Jensen Huang’s public rhetoric on China became more admiring, and his stance on export controls more critical, after the US restricted Nvidia’s China-made chip in 2025 – and he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
A Semafor analysis of 42 podcast interviews with Huang since early 2022 shows how Huang’s argument around global chip policy evolved in a series of lengthy, unscripted and often friendly contexts: Huang spoke about China’s strengths and presented Beijing as a formidable competitor as he argued more forcefully for a careful balance between protecting US interests and making US technology the backbone of China’s global development. AI.
Whether the Nvidia CEO’s position was influenced by his affair with an executive at a Singapore-based data center company with alleged ties to Beijing is now a question of the company’s board, which has hired Wall Street law firm Wachtell Lipton to investigate, and of Congress, which is planning hearings on the matter. But his stance on China and chip control has been in the spotlight recently.
Semafor identified dozens of exchanges about China during the interviews and used a pair of AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI to assess each on where Huang stood on export restrictions and how he viewed China.
Before China’s DeepSeek burst onto the world stage and Washington imposed new limits on Nvidia’s sales in the country in early 2025, Huang spoke on podcasts about export restrictions in a largely neutral manner, presenting them as a compliance issue, according to our review.
Mentions of China in Huang’s interviews increased sixfold after the 2025 restrictions, with the chip CEO saying the restrictions hurt the United States more than China. “If we leave a market completely, there is no doubt that someone else will step in,” he told Michael Milken in May 2025.
In 14 interviews since the 2025 restrictions, he has cited Chinese AI researchers, open source models and manufacturing, often as reasons why the United States cannot afford to cut off the country or has rejected the idea of treating it like an enemy.
He has brought up the “American tech stack” 34 times in eight interviews since July 2025, saying developers around the world should rely on American technology. In eight interviews, he said that 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese or in China, suggesting the country’s tech talent cannot be ignored.
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