Nvidia still hasn’t sold its U.S.-approved China AI chips — and it’s worried local AI rivals could take over

BEIJING — U.S. chip giant Nvidia has yet to recoup its lost sales in China, despite Washington easing some restrictions, and the company is sounding the alarm about rising competition from Chinese rivals.

“While small amounts of H200 [semiconductor] products for China-based customers were approved by the US government, we have yet to generate any revenue,” Nvidia’s CFO Colette M. Kress said on an earnings call Wednesday local time, according to a FactSet transcript.

“We do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China,” she said.

China once accounted for at least one-fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue.

The semiconductor giant also warned investors about rising competition from the world’s second-largest economy.

“Our competitors in China, bolstered by recent IPOs, are making progress and have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry over the long-term,” Kress said.

She urged the U.S. to encourage every developer and business, including those in China, to use American technology.

A flurry of Chinese AI chipmakers and large language model developers have gone public in Hong Kong and mainland China in the last few months. Expectations that the companies could be alternatives to U.S.-developed AI technology have helped the stocks — such as MiniMax and Moore Threads — surge soon after their IPOs, though not all names have seen sustained gains.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman also described the progress of Chinese tech companies across the entire stack as “remarkable” in an interview with CNBC on Feb. 19. He also noted that Chinese tech companies are near the frontier in some areas.

While Chinese AI companies lag the U.S. slightly in capabilities, their products are typically far cheaper than their American rivals.

“You could see easily a world where maybe most of the world’s population is running on a Chinese tech stack in five to 10 years’ time,” Rory Green, TS Lombard’s chief China economist and head of Asia research, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this month.