Nvidia's Jensen Huang seems to disagree with Trump on this big AI topic

By Britney Nguyen

The Nvidia CEO says he doesn't think the U.S. is far ahead of China in AI development, while President Donald Trump has suggested no other country poses a serious threat to the U.S.'s lead

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared in April with President Donald Trump.

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has positioned himself in the good graces of the second Trump administration. When it comes to China, however, it seems he and President Donald Trump don't exactly see eye-to-eye.

Overall, the U.S. is "not far ahead" of China in artificial-intelligence development, Huang said during a Wednesday morning appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box." That goes against comments from Trump earlier this week, which included his contention that the U.S. is "beating everybody with AI at levels that nobody ever thought even possible."

Huang said he was looking at the full artificial-intelligence stack, and, while the U.S. outpaces China with chips, China is "way ahead" of the U.S. when it comes to energy. And though the U.S. overall has better AI models from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, Huang said that China's open-source AI models, which are publicly available for developers to build off of, "are well ahead of us."

See also: Nvidia's stock can soar 35% more, Barclays says. Why AI spending estimates now seem less 'outlandish.'

When it comes to the application layer, or consumer-focused AI products, Huang warned that the U.S. has "to be quite mindful, because [China's] applications are very fast-moving." Chinese society adopts new technologies quickly, Huang said, citing less-stringent regulation in the country. That's "an area that I'm quite concerned about," he said.

The Nvidia (NVDA) CEO added that he hopes U.S. companies and society will be fast to adopt AI, because winning the AI race ultimately comes down to the AI application layer.

While the U.S. looks to be behind on energy, Huang said that he's "so happy" about Trump's "energy growth" stance, which he thinks will give a boost to the AI industry.

Trump touted his administration's energy efforts earlier this week - but presented a rosier picture than Huang's of how the U.S. stacks up relative to China in AI.

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, the president said that the U.S. is "No. 1 now with AI." One of the reasons for that, Trump said, is that he has allowed AI infrastructure builders "to build their own power" to meet the massive demand for electricity.

"Because of that and other things that we're doing, we're leading every country - nobody's even close to us with AI," Trump said.

But even if Huang and Trump don't share the same view on the state of the U.S.-China AI race, they do agree on having a strategy that puts the U.S. ahead by allowing countries around the world to build on the U.S. tech stack and according to U.S. standards. Huang said on CNBC that in Trump's AI action plan in July he was clear on an "America win-around-the-world strategy."

"We want to make sure the United States and American allies have the most advanced access to the most advanced AI chips," Huang said. "In order to win the AI race, you need to have all of the world's AI developers to be building on your platform."

Earlier this year, the Trump administration banned Nvidia from selling its H20 chips to China despite the chips being specifically designed to meet current export-control requirements. Trump later reversed the decision, and in August said that the U.S. would allow Nvidia and AMD to sell chips to China again in exchange for a 15% cut of the revenue. Huang has said he wants to sell a version of the company's Blackwell chips in China, as well.

See more: How Nvidia's H20 chip found itself at the center of the U.S.-China trade war

Addressing concerns over the Chinese military's access to advanced U.S. chips, Huang said it's also important to remember that China has its own chip industry with leaders such as Huawei.

"They have really sophisticated and really entrepreneurial startups building AI chips," Huang said. "So the fact of the matter is, their military has plenty of access to their own chips."

Huang again praised Trump's energy policies when asked about a recent Bloomberg News report that found electricity costs have rocketed by as much as 267% in areas located near large data centers.

"I'm not sure if it's true or not, but what we should do about it is to invest in power generation behind the meter," Huang told CNBC, adding that Trump has really "created the conditions by which we could go and do that and all become power-generation companies ourselves."

In the future, Huang said he expects AI data centers to have power-generation capabilities, whether through natural gas or another source, even nuclear.

Read on: Elon Musk's xAI may be the next AI company to do a creative financing deal involving Nvidia

-Britney Nguyen

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10-08-25 1403ET