NVIDIA, a US company that dominates the field of graphics processors and artificial intelligence technologies, has found itself at the center of discussions about the effectiveness of US export restrictions on advanced chips to China. Although these restrictions were introduced to curb China's military development and maintain the US leadership in the field of AI, a growing number of experts, including NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang himself, consider them a failure. This is reported by CNBC.
Huang said the restrictions have hurt American companies more than their Chinese competitors. For example, NVIDIA's market share in China has fallen from 95% to 50% over the past four years. This is a significant decline that has seriously affected the company's revenue. In April, NVIDIA said that the company lost more than $5.5 billion due to new restrictions that prohibit the sale of its latest H20 graphics processors in China.
Despite the significant technological lag of Chinese companies, many analysts believe that the restrictions imposed by the United States have pushed China to more actively develop its own chip industry. This has accelerated the pace of narrowing the gap with American competitors.
As independent tech analyst Ray Wang noted, export restrictions have only made it more difficult to achieve the initial goals, as China has chip stocks and is looking for loopholes that allow it to partially circumvent the bans.
There are also warnings that further tightening of controls creates a strategic problem for the United States. As Paul Triolo, a China expert at the DGA Group, emphasizes, American companies are not only losing access to the huge Chinese market, but also contributing to the emergence of new strong competitors, which are given an incentive to develop rapidly.
Although the most extensive restrictions were introduced during Joe Biden's presidency, their origins date back to the Donald Trump administration, which first began imposing restrictions on Huawei and SMIC, China's largest chip manufacturer.
In the end, the export control situation seems to have not only failed to curb the development of Chinese AI technologies, but has also undermined the positions of industry leaders in the United States. This raises increasing doubts about the appropriateness of such policies, which are turning into a "crossbow" for the American technology sector.