Nvidia chief visits China for the first time in four years as Chinese market headwinds mount

Tan KW

Publish date: Mon, 22 Jan 2024, 03:05 PM

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang Jen-hsun visited China for the first time in four years to attend company annual meetings, according to local media reports, as mainland Chinese market challenges mount for the US chip giant amid Washington’s moves to tighten export rules.

The Taiwan-born American entrepreneur visited Nvidia’s offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen over the past week, and appeared on stage at the company’s annual meetings, according to reports by Chinese media outlets.

In video clips circulating online, Huang, 60, appeared on stage at one meeting dressed in a floral-patterned vest and participated in a programme of Yangge, a type of folk dance from northern China.

Huang visited China to “celebrate new year with employees”, an Nvidia spokesperson told the South China Morning Post in a statement on Sunday, declining to disclose more details of his trip.

The trip was the billionaire founder’s first visit to China in more than four years, as the US chip giant remains in the cross hairs of intensified technology rivalry and escalated tensions between the US and China.

Huang’s last public appearance in China was in December 2019, when he spoke about the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the automotive, gaming and healthcare sectors.

In June last year, the Nvidia chief reportedly planned to visit Shanghai where he had planned to meet executives from Chinese technology companies including Tencent Holdings, TikTok owner ByteDance and smartphone giant Xiaomi. However, Huang ended up cancelling the trip.

Huang’s latest visit came as Nvidia faces increasing headwinds in the Chinese market. Last October the US government further tightened chip export restrictions, blocking China’s access to graphics processing units (GPU) that Nvidia had specifically designed for Chinese clients in response to earlier curbs.

Nvidia expects its sales to China and other US-restricted destinations, which together contributed about 20% to 25% of its data-centre revenues in the past several quarters, to “decrease significantly” in the fourth quarter because of the new rules, the company said in financial statements released in November.

The company is now developing new products for the Chinese market that would not trigger US restrictions, but warned that it was a “significant process” that would take time, as the firm tries “finding the right balance” for its customers in China in view of the US chip restrictions.

“We have to come up with new chips that comply with the regulation, and once we comply with the regulation, we’ll go back to China,” Huang said in November at The New York Times’ DealBook conference in New York. “We try to do business with everybody we can. On the other hand, our national security matters. Our national competitiveness matters.”

The founder said in December that the company has been “working very closely” with the US government to create compliant products. US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said last month that Nvidia “can, will and should sell AI chips to China because most AI chips will be for commercial applications”, but emphasised that the firm cannot sell its most advanced semiconductors to Chinese firms.

- SCMP

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