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China’s President Xi Jinping (R) met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The U.S. has looked to cut China off from key technologies like advanced semiconductors over the past few years. The two sides likely discussed tech tensions but analysts said not much is likely to change even as the two sides look to improve relations.

Leah Millis | AFP | Getty Images

Generative artificial intelligence, the technology that viral chatbot ChatGPT is based on, could be the new battleground in the battle for tech supremacy between the U.S. and China, according to one analyst.

Despite the two nations seeking better relations after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, analysts said the tech tensions will continue.

Washington has sought to cut off China from key technology like semiconductors while China has looked to boost its self-sufficiency and wean itself off American technology, touting its domestic sectors.

“The status quo isn’t likely to change much on any front — from sanctions to business pressure,” Abishur Prakash, CEO of Toronto-based advisory firm, The Geopolitical Business, told CNBC via email.

AI, which is seen as a critical technology by both nations, will likely be dragged into the battle between the two sides.

AI in the ‘crosshairs’

Meanwhile, the U.S. has looked to boost its own domestic technology including semiconductors, with funding such as the $52 billion available via the Chips and Science Act.

Washington’s attention is now likely to turn to generative AI.

“There will likely be more attempts coming from Washington to target the development in China of some types of applications, and generative AI could be in the crosshairs in the coming year,” Paul Triolo, the technology policy lead at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge, told CNBC.

It comes “as the Biden administration determines which technologies could benefit both China’s military modernization, and which could also boost Chinese companies’ ability to make breakthroughs in generative AI,” he added.

Generative AI relates to applications such as ChatGPT which are able to generate content when prompted by users.

How U.S. restrictions target A.I.

Read more about China from CNBC Pro

Washington is also carrying out an outbound investment review, which would put rules in place for American investment into foreign companies.

“The upcoming outbound investment review executive order will include restrictions on U.S. investment in some AI-related technologies, and this will be a major indication of the direction of U.S. technology controls in the final two years of the Biden administration,” Triolo said.

China’s generative A.I. push

Can China's ChatGPT clones give it an edge over the U.S. in an A.I. arms race?

Blinken-Xi meeting unlikely to change much

Beijing has accused the U.S. of violating international trade rules through its sanctions and said curbs on China’s chip industry amount to “bullying.”

Washington maintains its moves are in the interest of national security and are targeting specific sensitive technologies.

China hasn’t retaliated much. However, last month Chinese regulators barred operators of “critical information infrastructure” from buying chips from U.S. firm Micron, claiming the company’s products failed its network security review.

Technology wasn’t spoken about in public too much when Blinken recently met with China’s Xi, but the two sides no doubt discussed it.

Triolo told CNBC that the U.S. likely raised issues about the treatment of Micron while China would have brought up the export controls.

“Beijing views that package [export controls], and the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, as a one-two punch designed to decouple China’s semiconductor industry from the global semiconductor ecosystem,” Triolo said.

However, the two sides are in somewhat of a stalemate.

'De-risking' is a skillful way to frame China relations, says former German ambassador to China

Blinken spoke about areas of co-operation between the U.S. and China such as the climate crisis and the economy. But advanced technology is one area the two nations remain in competition.

“But, at the same time, as I said, it’s not in our interest to provide technology to China that could be used against us,” Blinken said on Monday.

“What China wants, the U.S. isn’t going to give, like opening up the chip ecosystem to Beijing or not scrutinizing Chinese investment in U.S. technology,” Prakash said. “The U.S.-China battle for technology supremacy is about to enter its primetime.”

Unlike the previous flashpoints, like over 5G or TikTok, when both sides still believed differences could be patched over, now such ideas are politically dead. The chasm between the U.S. and China has expanded so much — and neither superpower wants to bridge the differences.”

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee's ether company and the shares are surging

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022. 

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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Bitmine (BMNR) 1-month

The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another $37 million worth of stock

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another  million worth of stock

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Mustafa Yalcin | Anadolu | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.

Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.

AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.

That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

Read more CNBC tech news

In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.

Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.

Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.

WATCH: H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater’s Gene Munster

H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater's Gene Munster

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.

Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.

The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.

“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.

“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.

Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.

Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.

Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.

If all the AI developers are in China, the China stack is going to win, Nvidia CEO tells CNBC

The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.

“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.

Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.

“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”

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