logo
Nvidia CEO to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban, warns of 'tremendous loss' for firms in potential US$50B AI market

Nvidia CEO to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban, warns of 'tremendous loss' for firms in potential US$50B AI market

Photo: Facebook/Bobo Choi
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has signalled the company's intention to sell more advanced chips to China, warning that it would be a 'tremendous loss' for American firms to miss out on the country's artificial intelligence (AI) market, which could be worth up to US$50 billion in the next two to three years.
Speaking at a press conference in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, Mr Huang told CNBC, 'I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20.'
Referencing Hopper, Nvidia's chip architecture that the H20 chip is built on, he noted, 'Today Hopper's terrific, but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology,' adding that as technology continues to evolve, it is 'sensible that whatever we're allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well'.
The Nvidia CEO's remarks came after the company said on Monday that it would resume sales of the H20 chip in China—a chip specifically designed to bypass earlier export controls on Beijing. See also Malaysia leads in sustainable brands development
On July 14, Mr Huang announced in the company's blog that Nvidia is filing applications to sell the H20 GPU again, adding that US authorities had assured the company that licences will be granted, with hopes of starting deliveries soon. He also announced a 'fully compliant' RTX PRO GPU that is a 'digital twin AI for smart factories and logistics'.
In June, CNBC reported that Mr Huang also pointed out that if US firms are kept out of China's AI market, competitor Huawei has 'got China covered'.
At the press conference in Beijing, Mr Huang said that export controls are beyond the company's control and can be highly disruptive to the business. 'It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,' he added. /TISG
Read also: Nvidia CEO says that if he were a student today, he would learn AI to have a successful career document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => { const trigger = document.getElementById("ads-trigger"); if ('IntersectionObserver' in window && trigger) { const observer = new IntersectionObserver((entries, observer) => { entries.forEach(entry => { if (entry.isIntersecting) { lazyLoader(); // You should define lazyLoader() elsewhere or inline here observer.unobserve(entry.target); // Run once } }); }, { rootMargin: '800px', threshold: 0.1 }); observer.observe(trigger); } else { // Fallback setTimeout(lazyLoader, 3000); } });
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

What you need to know about Jensen Huang, the AI visionary in a leather jacket
What you need to know about Jensen Huang, the AI visionary in a leather jacket

Straits Times

time3 minutes ago

  • Straits Times

What you need to know about Jensen Huang, the AI visionary in a leather jacket

Find out what's new on ST website and app. Mr Jensen Huang convinced US President Donald Trump to lift restrictions on certain GPU exports to China. NEW YORK - Unknown to the general public just three years ago, Mr Jensen Huang is now one of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the world as head of chip giant Nvidia. The unassuming 62-year-old draws stadium crowds of more than 10,000 people as his company's products push the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI). Chips designed by Nvidia, known as graphics cards or graphics processing units (GPUs), are essential in developing the generative AI powering technology like ChatGPT. Big tech's insatiable appetite for Nvidia's GPUs, which sell for tens of thousands of dollars each, has catapulted the California chipmaker beyond US $4 trillion (S$5.1 trillion) in market valuation, the first company ever to surpass that mark. Nvidia's meteoric rise has boosted Mr Huang's personal fortune to US$150 billion – making him one of the world's richest people – thanks to the roughly 3.5 per cent stake he holds in the company he founded three decades ago with two friends in a Silicon Valley diner. In a clear demonstration of his clout, he recently convinced US President Donald Trump to lift restrictions on certain GPU exports to China, despite the fact that China is locked in a battle with the United States for AI supremacy. 'That was brilliantly done,' said Dr Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a governance professor at Yale University. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Singapore 1 in 3 vapes here laced with etomidate; MOH working with MHA to list it as illegal drug: Ong Ye Kung Singapore HSA extends hotline hours, launches new platform to report vaping offences Singapore Tampines regional centre set to get more homes, offices and public amenities Multimedia How to make the most out of small homes in Singapore World Diplomats dismissed: Inside the overhaul reshaping Trump's foreign policy Life US tech CEO Andy Byron resigns after viral Coldplay 'kiss cam' video Opinion I thought I was a 'chill' parent. Then came P1 registration Singapore 'God and government are the only things beyond our control,' says Group CEO Mr Huang was able to explain to Mr Trump that 'having the world using a US tech platform as the core protocol is definitely in the interest of this country' and will not help the Chinese military, Prof Sonnenfeld said. Early life Born in Taipei in 1963, Mr Jensen Huang (originally named Jen-Hsun) embodies the American success story. At nine years old, he was sent with his brother to boarding school in small-town Kentucky. His uncle recommended the school to his Taiwanese parents believing it to be a prestigious institution, when it was actually a school for troubled youth. Too young to be a student, Mr Huang boarded there but attended a nearby public school alongside the children of tobacco farmers. With his poor English, he was bullied and forced to clean toilets – a two-year ordeal that transformed him. 'We worked really hard, we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough,' he recounted in an interview with US broadcaster NPR. But 'the ending of the story is, I loved the time I was there,' Mr Huang said. Leather jacket and tattoo Brought home by his parents, who had by then settled in the north-western US state of Oregon, he graduated from university at just 20 and joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), then LSI Logic, to design chips – his passion. But he wanted to go further and founded Nvidia in 1993 to 'solve problems that normal computers can't,' using semiconductors powerful enough to handle 3D graphics, as he explained on the 'No Priors' podcast. Nvidia created the first GPU in 1999, riding the intersection of video games, data centres, cloud computing, and now, generative AI. Always dressed in a black T-shirt and leather jacket, Mr Huang sports an Nvidia logo tattoo and has a taste for sports cars. But it is his relentless optimism, low-key personality and lack of political alignment that sets him apart from the likes of Mr Elon Musk and Mr Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike them, Mr Huang was notably absent from Mr Trump's inauguration ceremony. 'He backpedals his own aura and let's the star be the technology rather than himself,' observed Prof Sonnenfeld, who believes Mr Huang may be 'the most respected of all today's tech titans'. One former high-ranking Nvidia employee described him to AFP as 'the most driven person' he had ever met. Street food On visits to his native Taiwan, Mr Huang is treated like a megastar, with fans crowding him for autographs and selfies as journalists follow him to the barber shop and his favourite night market. 'He has created the phenomena because of his personal charm,' noted Mr Wayne Lin of Witology Market Trend Research Institute. 'A person like him must be very busy and his schedule should be full every day meeting big bosses. But he remembers to eat street food when he comes to Taiwan,' he said, calling Mr Huang as being 'unusually friendly'. Nvidia is a tight ship and takes great care to project a drama-free image of Mr Huang. But the former high-ranking employee painted a more nuanced picture, describing a 'very paradoxical' individual who is fiercely protective of his employees but also capable, within Nvidia's executive circle, of 'ripping people to shreds' over major mistakes or poor choices. AFP

Japan heads to polls in key test for PM Shigeru Ishiba
Japan heads to polls in key test for PM Shigeru Ishiba

CNA

time3 hours ago

  • CNA

Japan heads to polls in key test for PM Shigeru Ishiba

TOKYO: Japanese voters could unleash political turmoil as they head to the polls on Sunday (Jul 20) in a tightly contested upper house election, with rising prices and immigration concerns threatening to weaken Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's grip on power. Opinion polls suggest Ishiba's Liberal Democratic Party and coalition partner Komeito may fall short of the 50 seats needed to retain control of the 248-seat upper house of parliament in an election where half the seats are up for grabs. The polls show smaller opposition parties pushing for tax cuts and increased public spending are set to gain, among them the right-wing Sanseito, which vows to curb immigration, oppose foreign capital inflows and reverse gender equality moves. A poor showing by the coalition could shake investor confidence in the world's fourth-largest economy and disrupt critical trade talks with the United States, analysts said. Ishiba may have to choose between making way for a new LDP leader or scrambling to secure the backing of some opposition parties with policy compromises, said Rintaro Nishimura, an associate at the Asia Group in Japan. "Each scenario requires the LDP and Komeito to make certain concessions, and will be challenging, as any potential partner has leverage in the negotiations." After the election, Japan faces a deadline of Aug 1 to strike a trade deal with the United States or face punishing tariffs in its largest export market. Such import levies could squeeze the economy and further pressure the government to give financial relief to households already reeling from inflation, such as a doubling of rice prices since last year. With an eye on a jittery government bond market, the LDP has called for fiscal restraint, rejecting opposition calls for major tax cuts and welfare spending to soften the blow. Ishiba's administration lost its majority in the more powerful lower house in October. That was the LDP's worst showing in 15 years, roiling financial markets and leaving the prime minister vulnerable to no-confidence motions that could topple his administration and trigger a fresh general election. Ruled by the LDP for most of the post-war period, Japan has so far largely avoided the social division and fracturing of politics seen in other industrialised democracies.

‘We were gutsy, a little foolish': Co-founder Lyn Lee on how Awfully Chocolate became a cult cake brand early in the game
‘We were gutsy, a little foolish': Co-founder Lyn Lee on how Awfully Chocolate became a cult cake brand early in the game

CNA

time7 hours ago

  • CNA

‘We were gutsy, a little foolish': Co-founder Lyn Lee on how Awfully Chocolate became a cult cake brand early in the game

Local F&B entrepreneurs would unanimously agree that two decades is a lifetime to remain in business. Soaring labour and ingredient costs aside, surely the eye-watering rents would be enough to drive an honest proprietor to rack and ruin — not to mention the occasional black swan event such as financial crises and a full-blown pandemic. Despite rolling with those punches to establish Awfully Chocolate as an enduring, 27-year-old local brand, its co-founder Lyn Lee is adamant about not downplaying the towering odds stacked against her and her counterparts. She has even declined interviews on the hot-button issue of rising rents. 'I don't want to be used to say, 'See, Awfully Chocolate can survive because they did this and that. You didn't pivot.' I will not be drawn into that,' she said. A tendency to couch her words in careful disclaimers hints at Lee's former career in law. But on one point, she's unequivocal: 'In any one of those cases of a business shutting down reported in the news, it was 100 per cent because of the rent,' she added emphatically. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Awfully Chocolate Singapore (@awfullychocolatesg) Yet, amid growing calls for government intervention to rein in rent hikes and safeguard local businesses, Lee stops short of echoing those demands and leans instead toward forging stronger support networks among fellow tenants. 'If we all started looking at how we could band together and support one another, that should be an improvement. Otherwise, the market may correct itself.' While the laws of capitalism may stand in the way of rent control, she does however, argue that a vibrant F&B sector doesn't develop by happenstance. 'Everyone says, Singapore is so boring and everything is the same. But if you don't have different markers for how to have different types of businesses, it will be very dull.' CHASING THE PERFECT CHOCOLATE CAKE Fitting into a ubiquitous mould was far from Lee and her co-founders' minds when they launched Awfully Chocolate in 1998, in the upheaval of the Asian Financial Crisis. There, in a quiet nook of pre-gentrified Katong, the friends opened a flagship store offering just one item: A simple chocolate cake they'd spent months refining. Focusing single-mindedly on just one product — with no fallback plan and zero market research to hitch their wagon to — was nothing short of audacious. Family and friends dismissed the venture as a non-starter and gave it two months to survive. 'To them, we were making very weird decisions,' she recalled. ''How can you open in Katong, where it's all about laksa and Peranakan food? Who's going to go there to buy a whole cake?'' But Lee and her co-founders, then in their 20s, weren't swayed. In her words, they were 'contrarian' — more inclined to go against the grain than follow it. 'My partners were 'Katong-ites'. They said we had to be where the best food is, and that if you could make it in Katong, you could make it anywhere else,' recounted Lee. While none of them possessed F&B experience, the huddle of dreamers had long flirted with the idea of embarking on 'some cool adventure.' Lee, a former lawyer who worked at leading law firm Allen & Gledhill, had left the profession to work in a media company. She convinced her young and restless crew to join her in her pursuit for the 'perfect chocolate cake.' It took months of folding batter into submission, and plying loved ones with chocolate cake, before they sank funds into leasing their Katong store. Its stark, pared down aesthetic had less to do with design intent than with the reality of a skint budget. They could scarcely afford a refrigerator, let alone a display counter. 'Our friend who helped to design the logo asked, 'Why do you need a display counter when you're only selling one cake? It would look so silly to display 12 dark brown circles',' she recalled. Defying convention, she said, helped them to stand out in a space saturated with Ultraman cakes dripping in chromatic excess. 'I believe the early articles called us the cake shop that doesn't look like a cake shop. It was quite cutting-edge.' Their first big break came from a feature in lifestyle magazine 8 Days, after being discovered by playwright Michael Chiang, who was formerly the editorial director of Mediacorp Publishing. 'When he chose to feature this funky little cake shop, it drew attention, because back then they wrote about music and entertainment, not food,' shared Lee. The publicity pole-vaulted the business into the public consciousness, and the phone didn't stop ringing after that. 'We could only bake around 50 cakes a day, so we would sell out and go home,' she recalled. Awfully Chocolate became a cult chocolate cake brand early in the game — thanks, in no small part, to a quality some would have written off as foolhardiness. 'We were gutsy, a little foolish, but we believed there might be enough room for us to do trial and error,' said Lee. She now tries to pass on some of that scrappy, self-starting spirit to her team, whom she encourages to produce their publicity videos in-house. 'I'm always pushing the younger generation to not worry that they may not have a formal qualification in something that the job scope requires,' shared the 52-year-old. A RECIPE FOR RESILIENCE Growing a hole-in-the-wall setup into an international brand — with franchises once spanning Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong — has, however necessitated no small measure of agility. Rather than framing her entrepreneurial journey as a dichotomy of missteps and masterstrokes, Lee views it as a series of moves, 'one step at a time.' When Awfully Chocolate first ventured into urban malls, the co-founders realised that shoppers weren't inclined to lug an entire cake from store to store. In response, they began opening cafes that offered cake by the slice, along with a medley of bite-sized indulgences including chocolate truffles and ice cream. Over time, they uncovered new revenue streams — from corporate gifting to, more recently, a product line curated for hotels. That's not to say they haven't made big swings, either. At the end of 2024, they launched their own roastery in China, where they've been experimenting with innovations such as tea brewed from caffeine-free cacao husks. The latter is served at The Awfully Chocolate Experience Cafe that opened in Wisma Atria that same year. 'We've had exchanges with leading agricultural scientists from Wilmar International, and learnt how to use some of their healthy plant-based innovations,' shared Lee. Years of investing heavily in research and development for their B2B arm have paid off. 'We have this whole in-house setup where corporates can give us a vague idea of what they want and our R&D, design and marketing teams will just bring it to life,' she said. These capabilities, she noted, have to an extent girded them against the vagaries of an increasingly volatile rental market. Other external pressures brought to bear upon the business include the COVID-19 pandemic that hit like a sledgehammer to their China operations. 'From over 60 stores, we were whittled down to just a handful in two cities,' she revealed, adding that conditions in the mainland remain challenging amid a sluggish economy. While the pandemic took its toll on business in Singapore, Lee says they pulled through by biting the bullet and forgoing their salaries, for the most part, during those trying months. 'One of my business partners who did a lot of work restructuring companies during the Asian Financial Crisis shared that those that made it had teams that came together and believed that they would come out stronger if they made the sacrifices,' she related. 'When everyone starts thinking about themselves, that's when you see the whole thing fall apart.' Working with her friends for close to three decades, she insists, has been a blast, with no major conflict to grouse of. 'I'm very much a frontline person — I always think like a customer. Some of my partners, on the other hand, aren't that way,' she laughed. 'But that's the wonderful diversity and synergy between different personalities.' While the close-knit group may wax facetious about the 'cliche' of building a business on Lee's love of chocolate, it's proven to be a richly layered endeavour. For one, delving into the nuances of the Singaporean palate has deepened her appreciation for her country itself. Locals, she observes, tend to favour dark chocolate that's neither overly rich nor cloying, with a warm, toasty finish. 'I almost liken this to how amazing Singapore's food is. Like how there must be wok hei (smokiness),' enthused Lee. She volunteered that she eats chocolate cake for breakfast — a habit her kids 'find weird.' 'I love that we have our own Singaporean identity when it comes to chocolate preference, and I hope that we can share that more with the world.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store