BEIJING — US semiconductor giant Nvidia Despite the U.S. government relaxing some regulations, the company has yet to recover from lost sales in China, and the company is warning of increased competition from Chinese rivals.
“While a small number of H200 (semiconductor) products for China-based customers have been approved by the U.S. government, we have not yet generated revenue,” NVIDIA CFO Colette M. Kress said during an earnings call Wednesday, according to a FactSet transcript.
“We don’t know if they will be allowed to be imported into China,” she said.
China once accounted for at least a fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue.
Global AI disruption
The semiconductor giant also warned investors about increasing competition from the world’s second-largest economy.
“Chinese competitors have strengthened and made strides with recent IPOs, which could disrupt the structure of the global AI industry in the long term,” Kress said.
He called on the United States to encourage all developers and companies, including Chinese ones, to use American technology.
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In recent months, a number of Chinese AI chip makers and large-scale language model developers have gone public in Hong Kong and mainland China. Expectations that these companies could provide an alternative to AI technology developed in the United States supported stock prices. mini max and Moore Threads soared immediately after their IPOs, but not all companies achieved sustained profits.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman also called the Chinese tech company’s progress across the stack “remarkable” in an interview with CNBC on February 19th. He also pointed out that Chinese high-tech companies are close to the frontier in some fields.
Although Chinese AI companies lag slightly behind the United States in capabilities, their products are typically much cheaper than their American rivals.
“In five to 10 years, we could easily see a world where probably most of the world’s population is running on a Chinese technology stack,” Rory Green, chief China economist and head of Asia research at TS Lombard, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this month.
