David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offered a fiery defense of his push to sell chips in China.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously wrote that such sales were like selling nukes to North Korea.
- Huang said the US doesn’t want a world where its tech stack is used only for closed-source models.
There’s one subject Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will likely never agree on.
Huang, who has repeatedly defended his belief that US companies should be able to sell advanced chips in China, didn’t take kindly to Amodei comparing such sales to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and then bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing” in a recent essay.
When tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel mentioned Amodei’s quote during a recent episode of the “Dwarkesh Podcast,” Huang immediately pushed back.
“Comparing AI to anything that you just mentioned is lunacy,” Huang said.
Amodei is one of the most outspoken opponents in the AI and tech industry against the position that the US should sell advanced chips in China in hopes of getting companies reliant on the US tech stack. Huang has previously said the Chinese sales could account for $50 billion a year for Nvidia. The Anthropic CEO has said such sales would give China a leg up that it doesn’t need.
“China is several years behind the US in their ability to produce frontier chips in quantity, and the critical period for building the country of geniuses in a datacenter is very likely to be within those next several years,” Amodei wrote in his essay “The Adolescence of Technology,” published in January. “There is no reason to give a giant boost to their AI industry during this critical period.”
Huang became more defiant when Patel pushed Amodei’s argument further by comparing AI compute to enriched uranium, a key component of a nuclear weapon.
“We’re not enriched uranium. It’s a chip, and it’s a chip that they can make themselves,” Huang said.
Amodei did not mention Nvidia or Huang by name in his January essay, but it was clear who he was writing about, given the Nvidia CEO’s persistent lobbying. The pair have clashed before, but tensions seemed to be improving after Nvidia announced in November that it could invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a partnership between Nvidia, Anthropic, and Microsoft.
Ultimately, Huang said, the arguments call for the US to concede “the second largest market in the world for no good reason at all.” The Nvidia CEO said he’s concerned about a world where closed-source models are dominant in the US but open-source models, which are extremely popular in China, have their own space.
“It would be extremely foolish to create two ecosystems: the open source ecosystem, and it only runs on a foreign tech stack, and a closed ecosystem that runs on the American tech stack,” Huang said. “I think that would be a horrible outcome for the United States.”
Huang successfully pushed the Trump administration to allow sales of H-200 chips, an older generation, in China, a reversal of Biden-era restrictions on such business due to national security concerns, provided that the US government receives a 25% cut of any sales.
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress told analysts in February that the chipmaker had “yet to generate any revenue” from H-200 sales in China. The Financial Times previously reported that a US security review had slowed down final approval.
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