Auzinea Bacon
California-based Nvidia has led the charge in the AI chips race, as a leading manufacturer of the technology powering data centers. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Tech giant Nvidia is the world’s leading artificial-intelligence chipmaker, but the company’s success has also put it in the crossfire of trade tensions.
The Santa Clara, California-based company, which is approaching a market capitalization of $5 trillion, has seen rapid growth due to its chips, which are predominantly used to power massive data centers used by other tech firms, like OpenAI, the creator of popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.
But Nvidia’s leading technology has been used as a negotiating tool in President Donald Trump’s trade spat with China, which was kickstarted by Trump’s sweeping tariffs in April and has escalated over rare earth mineral disputes.
It’s further complicated Nvidia’s relationship with China, where it was doing roughly 25% of its graphics processing unit sales, estimates Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. Nvidia’s popularity has also embroiled the company in a steep controversy for potentially allowing China to skirt around export restrictions as trade tensions continue.
“Nvidia has gotten caught in the middle of two very important things: a trade dispute between China and the United States … but more importantly, AI has become a matter of national security,” Luria said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that restricting sales of American AI chips will ultimately enable Chinese developers to create their own alternatives.
Who is Jensen Huang?
Huang, 62, was born in Taiwan, and at age 9 was sent by his parents to live in Tacoma, Washington. In 1993, the Oregon State and Stanford University grad co-founded Nvidia, which started as a graphics-based processing company.
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