On the night of November 5, 2025, in a private room at Taipei's Grand Hyatt Hotel, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang reportedly delivered a blunt prediction to an audience of twelve tech elites — executives from TSMC, Foxconn, and Quanta, along with top US venture capitalists. The dinner was meant to be strictly off-record, but his remarks later leaked to the Financial Times and were cross-verified by other major outlets. NVIDIA declined to comment, and Huang canceled all scheduled media interviews afterward.
His opening statement, per the account:
> "If you ask me who will win the generative AI race over the next 5–10 years — China will win. It's that simple."
His reasoning rested on three pillars:
Key points
1. Unmatched scale
- China reportedly has about 1 million people working on AI around the clock — "not 100,000, but 1 million."
- By contrast, he estimated that at most 20,000 people in all of Silicon Valley work full-time on large models, even in a good market.
- In foundational models, which demand massive investment and continuous iteration, this scale gap itself is a nearly insurmountable barrier.
- "They won't give up. The more you sanction them, the harder they work. You can't stop them. The more you block, the more energized they get."
- External封锁 pressure acts like pressing on a spring — it accumulates rebound energy, reinforcing domestic resolve and legitimizing self-reliance efforts.
- Huang called the export controls "the dumbest thing we've ever done," saying the US effectively handed China its best national mobilization mission in 50 years — "like a Sputnik moment on steroids."
- Like the 1957 Sputnik launch that galvanized the US into the space race, the chip ban ended China's internal debates over technology strategy and provided a clear national goal.
2. Sanctions backfire
3. A strategic gift — a Sputnik moment on steroids
On Huawei
> "Don't underestimate Huawei. Their Ascend 910C is only 8–12% slower than the H100 in most workloads — and they can now produce 200,000 units per month."
While Washington debates CFIUS terms, competitor capacity is already surging.
The warning
Huang's logic converged on a cold prediction:
> "Washington thinks they are stopping China. They are not stopping China — they are accelerating China. By 2027, China will have more AI compute than the rest of the world combined. Remember my words."
He closed with brutal directness: "So go ahead and keep sanctioning if you want. Just understand: you are handing them the trophy yourselves."
After that night, the account leaked to the Financial Times and spread rapidly across global media. NVIDIA built a wall of silence with "no comment," and Huang canceled his media appearances — but the words spoken in that private room had already sketched a complete, self-consistent, and cautionary vision of the future: an AI crown not seized by a rival, but handed over by the reigning king in a strategic miscalculation.