Biden trade curbs on China risk huge damage to US tech sector, says Nvidia chief

theguardian.com:

The US risks causing “enormous damage” to its tech industry if it continues restrictions on trade with China, according to the chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia.

Jensen Huang said curbs introduced by the Biden administration, which include restricting the export to China of advanced chips made with US technology, had left the business with “our hands tied behind our back”. “If [China] can’t buy from … the United States, they’ll just build it themselves,” said Huang in an interview with the Financial Times. “So the US has to be careful. China is a very important market for the technology industry.”

Nvidia said last August that US officials had told it to stop exporting two artificial intelligence chips to China, although the company later announced the development of a product that would meet US government restrictions. Nvidia’s chips are a key tool in the development of the large language models that underpin chatbots such as ChatGPT.

In October, the Biden administration published further export controls on the technology, including a measure to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US tools. Senior US officials said many of the rules sought to prevent foreign firms from selling advanced chips to China or supplying Chinese firms with tools to make their own advanced chips.

Huang urged Washington to be “thoughtful” before imposing further restrictions on trade with China. The FT noted that his comments were made days before China announced a curb on using products made by US chipmaker Micron in key Chinese infrastructure. “If we are deprived of the Chinese market, we don’t have a contingency for that. There is no other China, there is only one China,” said Huang. He added that there