As Nvidia solidifies its AI dominance, it faces a new era of competition from China

With Chinese firms scaling and a looming U.S. tariff uncertainty, Nvidia is now fighting to keep its foothold in China.

Speaking on BG2, a podcast hosted by tech investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said China is just “nanoseconds behind” the U.S. in chipmaking.

China has been accelerating its plans to become self-sufficient.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) have helped push the company’s market capitalization to record highs. Nvidia’s stock has rallied to become the first company to surpass a $4 trillion market value.

The company has since been developing and deploying AI infrastructure and models through key partnerships- the most recent being with OpenAI.

But sales to China, one of the world’s biggest markets, have been disrupted by geopolitical tensions.

The tensions have been good news to many Chinese AI and semiconductor contenders who have rushed to fill the gap by launching local alternatives, in turn eroding Nvidia’s market share.

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies recently unveiled its AI chip road map, showcasing clustering methods intended to bypass Nvidia.
Major cloud-services providers in China including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, ByteDance and Baidu are heavily investing in chip research and design, either through in-house projects or external partnerships. This strategy is aimed at securing greater control over their supply chains and avoid any supply disruption.

AI partnerships

Through its AI investments, Nvidia has held the investor confidence.

Recently in the ‘the biggest AI infrastructure deployment in history’, Nvidia partnered with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts for OpenAI’s next-gen AI infrastructure.

As a part of the partnership, Nvidia will invest $100 billion to ramp up the computing power of OpenAI.

The companies, in its release, said,

This partnership complements the deep work OpenAI and Nvidia are already doing with a broad network of collaborators, including Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and Stargate partners, focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure.

Last week, Nvidia announced its investment of $5 billion in fellow chipmaker Intel, which has struggled to keep up with the frenzied demand for AI.

Nvidia has had a history of strategic partnerships to expand its AI footprint.

Amid a positive second quarter, the company announced an investment of £2 billion in the U.K. market’s AI startup ecosystem.

Late September this year, Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company announced its partnership with Nvidia stating that it will be adding NVIDIA’s AI capabilities into Alibaba’s ecosystem, enabling AI in robotics, smart factories, self-driving, a strategic move amid China’s restrictions on import of advanced NVIDIA chips.

But that’s not all.

Since January 2003, Nvidia has been either partnering or investing heavily to lead the AI race. Here’s the list: