Everyone’s rattled by the rise of DeepSeek—except Nvidia, which enabled it
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On President Trump’s inauguration day, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang wasn’t sitting by the president’s side at the Capitol like many tech moguls. He wasn’t invited, an Nvidia official said, so he had gone to Beijing.
At a gathering there, Huang told customers and employees of his strong commitment to the Chinese market, according to a recording. That meant Nvidia intended to keep selling chips for artificial intelligence in China, holding back their performance to comply with ever-tighter curbs imposed by Washington. A week later, Nvidia’s stock price fell 17% in a single day, after Chinese company DeepSeek said it achieved a leap in its AI capabilities using less-advanced Nvidia chips.
Some investors interpreted the advance as undercutting the market in the West for Nvidia’s top-of-the-line products. Yet Nvidia knew that risk came with what it was doing in China, the country identified by both political parties in Washington as America’s biggest global rival. The Silicon Valley company argues that selling to Chinese customers helps it bring in revenue to keep its global lead in AI.
Better to have those customers paying Nvidia billions of dollars and remaining hooked on its chips—plus the software surrounding them—than to send them searching for a Chinese alternative, company officials say. For the past three years, Nvidia, valued at around $3 trillion thanks to its dominance in AI chips, has battled to keep doing as much business as possible in China. Each time the U.S.
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