June 6, 2025 — U.S. export restrictions on advanced AI chips have unintentionally boosted China's AI development, with many top engineers who once worked on NVIDIA's software ecosystem now helping Huawei, according to Bill Dally, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA.

Speaking on June 2 at the second annual AI Expo hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) in Washington, Dally said the AI race now goes beyond corporate rivalry and has become a matter of national competition. He argued that the U.S. government's ban on exporting high-end chips, including NVIDIA's H20 model, has pushed Chinese companies to aggressively build up their own AI capabilities — especially in talent.

“Many of the Chinese AI researchers who used to write code for NVIDIA are now developing software for Huawei,” Dally said. “If it weren't for the restrictions, Huawei wouldn't have grown this fast.”

Dally pointed out that China has significantly expanded its share of global AI talent. In 2019, about one-third of the world's top AI researchers were based in China; today, the number has climbed to nearly 50%. While the U.S. still leads in AI hardware, China is rapidly catching up through talent acquisition and in-house development.

Huawei, for instance, has built a large AI research team composed of many former NVIDIA engineers. These experts are now working on Huawei's CANN software platform — a CUDA alternative — in a push to close the software ecosystem gap. Though CANN still lags behind CUDA in performance, the influx of experienced engineers is expected to accelerate its evolution.

Dally emphasized that the growth of AI over the past decade has been driven more by hardware design optimization than by raw semiconductor improvements. He warned that cutting off access to the Chinese market could hurt U.S. innovation in the long run, as it severs a critical source of technical feedback.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently echoed similar concerns, noting that Huawei's CloudMatrix AI cluster now competes directly with NVIDIA's Grace Blackwell platform. He acknowledged that U.S. restrictions have caused NVIDIA to lose ground in China, where Huawei's share of the AI solution market has surged 28% in just one year.