By Alina Maria Stan
Publication Date: 2026-04-18 11:14:00
In short: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned on the Dwarkesh Podcast that DeepSeek optimising its AI models for Huawei’s Ascend chips instead of American hardware would be “a horrible outcome” for the United States, as the Chinese AI lab prepares to launch its V4 foundation model on Huawei’s Ascend 950PR processor. The migration from Nvidia’s CUDA to Huawei’s CANN framework threatens to break the software-hardware dependency underpinning American AI dominance, even as US lawmakers push to place DeepSeek on the entity list for export control.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the Dwarkesh Podcast on Wednesday that if DeepSeek optimised its new AI models to run on Huawei chips rather than American hardware, it would be “a horrible outcome” for the United States. The warning frames the emerging partnership between China’s most capable AI lab and its most advanced chipmaker as a direct threat to the technological leverage that has underpinned American AI dominance for the past decade.
“If future AI models are optimised in a very different way than the American tech stack,” Huang said, and as “AI diffuses out into the rest of the world” with Chinese standards and technology, China “will become superior to” the US. The statement is notable because it comes from the CEO of the company that has benefited most from the current arrangement, in which virtually every frontier AI model in the world is trained on Nvidia GPUs using…
