(Yicai) July 21 -- Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, who is in China to attend the international supply chain expo, said the country is a unique and singular market, rather than one of many markets.

"The dynamics of this market, the innovation, dynamism, the space of this market, this industry is simply singular," Huang said in an interview with China Central Television. The country is an irreplaceable market despite ongoing trade tensions, he pointed out.

Huang was invited for his third trip to China this year to deliver a keynote address at the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing on July 16, which attracted 651 companies from 75 countries.

Excerpts from the interview are below: 

CCTV: How important is the Chinese market for Nvidia?

Jensen Huang: This market is both dynamic, insanely innovative, with brilliant engineers. It has one of the world's largest populations of computer scientists, the only other population this large is in the United States. And the population of consumers is extremely large.

This is not a normal market. As a technology provider, we need customers, all providers need customers, and this marketplace is very unique. You can't be complacent about that, and the unintended consequence, the long-term consequence of not participating in the China market, is unknown, but I doubt that it's positive.

CCTV: Some have expressed concerns that the United States lifting its ban on Nvidia selling its H20 AI chips in China might hinder domestic innovation. What's your perspective?

JH: There is no way to stop the pace of domestic innovation. I believe that Nvidia can make a great contribution. It is a very complicated stack.

Underneath our chips, there are systems, networking technology, artificial intelligence infrastructure software, AI algorithms, and then the applications and services on top. That entire stack is extraordinarily complex.

On the one hand, it requires all the innovation across that stack to advance AI. If each layer is not moving fast, the engineers are so smart to innovate at the layer above or below to make up for it, and the entire stack moves forward. That's one of the reasons why you have to admire the incredible innovation of DeepSeek.

Their model, called R1, is genuinely innovative. It re-architected many of the ways that AI models operate so that it can take advantage of the H20 architecture. As a result, they achieved world-class results, even though they were built on H20s.

So researchers and developers, they could adjust to each one of the layers. I have a lot of optimism and confidence in the innovation capabilities of China to adapt to whatever resources it has.

Remember, H20, although it isn't the most advanced that Nvidia provides, is still extraordinary in terms of capability. It is the architecture that defined, that created, the AI revolution.

Competition With Chinese Companies

JH: If we're not here, the local market will be served. There are innovative companies. Huawei is not only innovative, this is a company with extraordinary scale and might. Huawei is a much bigger company than we are in scale.

If we are not here, this market will be served by Chinese innovators, chip companies. Many cloud service providers will build their own chips. China's AI market will advance with or without Nvidia. If we are not here, Huawei will find a way.

That's my confidence in human innovation. If there's a will, there's a way. There's every reason to respect and admire Huawei's achievements. This is an extraordinary technology company. And whatever they decide to dedicate themselves to and put their mind to, they will surely do well.

CCTV: Is Huawei your competitor or partner?

First of all, the company philosophy and culture, and what they've overcome in setbacks, what they've achieved and built, there's nothing you can possibly say aside from extraordinarily, they should be admired for their achievements. The company still remains intensely competitive.

They are our competitors, but you could still have admiration and respect and have great relationships with people you compete with. We're competitors, not enemies. The world is large and I hope we will have an opportunity to compete for many years to come, but my feelings toward them are admiration, respect, and competitive.

The big idea here is that there are companies that compete, there are nations that compete, and all of that coexist at the same time.

On Supply Chain Resilience

CCTV: How can the International Supply Chain Expo help companies facing global uncertainties?

JH: China operates one of the world's largest supply chains. The scale, complexity, diversity, the type of products that are manufactured, the technologies that are included, and the number of companies that participate in building out the China supply chain are unquestionably one of the world's great miracles. China also builds equipment and control systems and components for the rest of the world's supply chain.

Because the world supply chains are becoming more diversified and more redundant, it creates an enormous opportunity for China to export its supply chain manufacturing technology all over the world, as supply chains and manufacturing lines are being created around the world.

But it won't change the fact that no matter what happens, there's no reasonable destination where the world's supply chains are somehow completely disconnected, it is simply too complicated and will always be connected. You also want that connection.

This is the beautiful thing about a supply chain. There is no way at this point, with so much complexity and so many different industries, to imagine a world where the supply chain isn't interconnected and interdependent, so that interdependent dependency is a necessary condition, it's a good condition. It gives us resilience, and although we don't manufacture much in China, we have many customers and partners, technology partners, that we serve in China's supply chain.

The supply chain was designed for agility. The supply chain has a lot of redundancy built into it, and that is one of the great wisdom of the supply chain architecture of today. Today's dynamic environment is going to rely on China's supply chain expertise more than ever.

AI Revolution and Future Outlook

CCTV: Once you said everything moving can be robotic very soon. How soon?

JH: It's now. We see there are self-driving cars all over China and autonomous vehicles. Advances are happening faster here than just about anywhere. Xpeng has it, Li Auto has it, Nio has it, Xiaomi has it, BYD has it. The capability of fusing AI and software and mechanical systems is a very natural capability of China.

This is an extraordinary time because this is the beginning of a brand new technology revolution, probably the greatest technology revolution of all time. The automated production of intelligence, AI.

I don't remember the last time a technology of this impact has been invented. Give me one example of another time when another technology has been at the top of the mind of every national leader everywhere in the world.

Editor: Martin Kadiev