Nvidia raises concerns about Huawei’s growing AI chip capabilities with US lawmakers

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang discussed concerns about Huawei Technologies’ growing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with US lawmakers, according to a senior congressional committee staff source.

The issues were raised during a closed-door meeting between Nvidia executives and the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday. Among the topics discussed were Huawei’s AI chips and how restrictions on Nvidia’s chips in China could make Huawei’s chips more competitive.

“If DeepSeek-R1 had been trained on [Huawei chips] or a future open-source Chinese model had been trained to be highly optimised to Huawei chips, that would risk creating a global market demand for Huawei chips,” the senior staff source said.

In a statement, Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo said “Jensen met with the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss the strategic importance of AI as national infrastructure and the need to invest in US manufacturing. He reaffirmed Nvidia’s full support for the government’s efforts to promote American technology and interests around the world.”

Nvidia’s chips, which are central to developing chatbots, image generators and other AI systems, have been the target of US export controls since the first administration of US President Donald Trump. Nvidia has responded by designing chips for the Chinese market that have complied with the changing rules.

Last month, however, the company said it had been asked by the Trump administration to stop selling its most recent China offering, a chip called the H20. Chinese customers had been ramping up orders for those chips thanks to low-cost AI models such those from DeepSeek.