By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang discussed concerns about Huawei Technologies Co.’s growing artificial intelligence capabilities with U.S. lawmakers, according to a senior congressional committee staff source.
The issues were raised during a closed-door meeting between Nvidia executives and the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday. Among the topics discussed were Huawei’s artificial intelligence chips and how restrictions on Nvidia’s chips in China could make Huawei’s chips more competitive.
“If DeepSeek R1 had been trained on (Huawei chips) or a future open-source Chinese model had been trained to be highly optimized to Huawei chips, that would risk creating a global market demand for Huawei chips,” the senior staff source said.
In a statement, Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said “Jensen met with the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss the strategic importance of AI as national infrastructure and the need to invest in U.S. manufacturing. He reaffirmed Nvidia’s full support for the government’s efforts to promote American technology and interests around the world.”
Nvidia’s chips, which are central to developing chatbots, image generators and other AI systems, have been the target of U.S. export controls since the first administration of President Donald Trump. Nvidia has responded by designing chips for the Chinese market that have complied with the changing rules.
Last month, however, the company said it had been asked by the Trump administration to stop selling its most recent China offering, a chip called the H20. Chinese customers had been ramping up orders for those chips thanks to low-cost AI models such those from DeepSeek.
Huawei has stepped in to fill the gap left by Nvidia in China, Reuters reported last month, by preparing for mass shipments of a chip designed to compete against Nvidia’s offerings.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Editing by Franklin Paul and Diane Craft)
