Tech giant Nvidia is the world’s leading artificial-intelligence chipmaker, but the company’s success has also put it in the crossfire of trade tensions.
The Santa Clara, California-based company, which is approaching a market capitalization of $5 trillion, has seen rapid growth due to its chips, which are predominantly used to power massive data centers used by other tech firms, like OpenAI, the creator of popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.
But Nvidia’s leading technology has been used as a negotiating tool in President Donald Trump’s trade spat with China, which was kickstarted by Trump’s sweeping tariffs in April and has escalated over rare earth mineral disputes.
It’s further complicated Nvidia’s relationship with China, where it was doing roughly 25% of its graphics processing unit sales, estimates Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. Nvidia’s popularity has also embroiled the company in a steep controversy for potentially allowing China to skirt around export restrictions as trade tensions continue. Huang — who is worth $167 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — has been treated as a rockstar in Taiwan for his success in the AI chips race, and previously worked as a microprocessor designer at now-competitor AMD.
“It’s really unusual to have somebody who can go from starting what was at the time a very small tech startup and grow it to the extraordinary level of success that Nvidia has grown to,” John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of Huang. Nvidia powers the data centers that support AI technology and has been the go-to provider of those chips.
Nvidia essentially created the architecture for anyone who develops AI, leading to a surge in demand for its technology, according to Arun Sundararajan, a professor of technology, operations and statistics at NYU Stern School of Business. “We have engaged with the U.S. government regarding Megaspeed, performed our own inquiry, and have not identified any reason to believe products have been diverted. NVIDIA visited multiple Megaspeed sites yet again earlier this week and confirmed what we previously observed—Megaspeed is running a small commercial cloud, like many other companies throughout the world, as allowed by U.S. export control rules. The Administration’s AI Action plan rightly encourages businesses worldwide to embrace U.S. standards and U.S. leadership, benefitting national and economic security,” an Nvidia spokesperson told.
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