Jensen Huang‘s interview on CCTV's program “Face to Face”

We continue our coverage of Jensen Huang’s visit to Beijing. On July 20, 2025, Jensen Huang was interviewed on China Central Television’s program Face to Face.

In the interview, he praised China’s innovation capabilities and market vitality in the field of artificial intelligence, calling the country a “unique” tech ecosystem. He emphasized that even without Nvidia, China’s AI development would continue to advance. Huang reiterated his view that U.S.-China relations in technology and supply chains involve both “competition and cooperation,” expressed a strong desire to continue serving the Chinese market, and noted that the future of the global AI industry will heavily depend on China’s strengths in engineering, manufacturing, and talent.

Here is the full transcript of the interview.

(Voice-over)
On July 16, 2025, the 3rd China International Supply Chain Promotion Expo, organized by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, opened as scheduled at the Shunyi Pavilion of the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing. A total of 651 companies and institutions from 75 countries and regions gathered. Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, attended the expo for the first time and delivered a speech at the opening ceremony.

Jensen Huang:
This will be my first time that I deliver a speech in Chinese.

Host:
So you have done a lot of preparation work before.

Jensen Huang:
Yes, this morning I woke up early. I've been up since 4:00.

Jensen Huang:
I’m glad to be here in China—it’s my first time attending the Supply Chain Expo. The scale is very large, and the atmosphere is very energetic.

(Voice-over)
At the expo’s opening ceremony, Huang did not wear his trademark leather jacket. Instead, he appeared in a traditional Tang suit and began his speech in Chinese.

Jensen Huang:
I’m gonna… do the rest of my speech in English now.

Host:
First you speak in Chinese… and then you give it up in the middle and pick it up at the end. So why?

Jensen Huang:
Because if I did the whole thing in Chinese, it would have taken half an hour. It would take two… I was so nervous. My Chinese I learned in the U.S.—just casually, by myself.

(Voice-over)
The Supply Chain Expo is the world’s first national-level exhibition devoted to supply chains. Against the backdrop of global transformations and increasing international uncertainty, supply chains are under tremendous pressure. The theme this year — “Linking the World, Co-Creating the Future” — reflects the vision of achieving mutual benefit amid uncertainty.

Host:
How might the Supply Chain Expo help? Because not just Nvidia, but firms around the world are facing the same problem.

Jensen Huang:
China operates one of the world's largest supply chains. The scale, complexity, diversity—the types of products that are manufactured, the technologies involved, and the number of companies that participate in building out China’s supply chain—make it unquestionably one of the world’s great miracles. China also builds equipment, control systems, and components for the rest of the world’s supply chains. So, not only does China operate its own, it also creates the technologies and products that power other countries’ supply chains.

And because global supply chains are becoming more diversified—and, if you will, more redundant—it creates an enormous opportunity for China to export its supply chain manufacturing technologies around the world, as new supply chains and manufacturing lines are being developed globally.

But that doesn’t change the fact that, no matter what happens, there is no realistic scenario in which the world’s supply chains become completely disconnected. They are simply too complex—and they will always remain connected. And, in fact, you want that connection. That’s the beautiful thing about a supply chain: at this point, with so much complexity and so many industries involved, it’s impossible to imagine a world in which supply chains are not interconnected and interdependent.

That interdependence is not just inevitable—it’s beneficial. It gives us resilience. And although we don’t manufacture much in China, we have many customers, partners, and technology collaborators whom we serve within China’s supply chain.

(Voice-over)
During the event, China CCPIT released its 2025 Global Supply Chain Promotion Report along with a Global Supply Chain Index Matrix. The data showed that although global economic uncertainty is rising, positive stabilizing factors are still dominant.

Jensen Huang:
The world supply chain is massive and interlinked — Nvidia benefits from a highly advanced, technical supply chain. It’s global, and we have manufacturing partners worldwide. To build our AI supercomputers, 100 to 200 different technology partners contribute to our products.

Jensen Huang:
The invention of the word supply chain came from the idea that many companies contribute to the creation of your product. Yeah, instead of thinking about manufacturing, which is you build everything yourself, you're vertically integrated in every way. You use a supply chain to integrate the capabilities, the specialized capabilities of many companies, many countries around the world. As a result, the end product is better than anything you can possibly do yourself. America, it won't manufacture everything by itself and it's not sensible to manufacturing everything by itself and nor is it necessary to.

Jensen Huang:
So this wisdom, this incredible genius of the creation of what is called the supply chain, really came out of my generation. Before it was called manufacturing. Now it's called supply chain management. And manufacturing is still a big part of it, but supply chain integration is very complex. And it is the, it's one of humanity's great inventions.

(Voice-over)
This year’s Expo featured 15% more U.S. exhibitors than the last, maintaining its position as the largest group of foreign participants. Nvidia, participating for the first time, showcased multiple AI solutions such as robotics simulation and digital-twin big data learning. Over 100 tech staff were on site to assist visitors. Huang himself visited China for the third time this year.

Jensen Huang:
I feel very welcome when I'm here, and I genuinely believe our customers and partners here really welcome us and value us. You know, today the requirement for more agility, more speed, more automation, that those elements are essential to a world that is becoming more volatile, more dynamic. And so in fact, it's a great opportunity for people who build technologies and who are experts at supply chains and videos. One of our great expertise is a really agile supply chain. And so agility is about agile. Why? Meaning no matter the change in supply, change in demand, change in supplier disruptions, whatever it is because the products we build are so complicated. If we have one and a half million components inside our AI supercomputer, then if one component is missing or failing or short of supply, then the entire system cannot be built. Yes, so we have to be rather agile and being able to adapt to changing conditions of everything. And so having agility in your supply chain and having technology that enables agility is really vital.

Jensen Huang:
This is a great opportunity for China. Now the fact of the matter is, I have every confidence that although disruptions are unwelcome, it could be a weather disruption, it could be a geopolitical disruption, it could be supplier quality disruption. These, none of the disruptions are welcome. The supply chain was designed for agility. You know, the supply chain has a lot of redundancy built into it. Hum. And that is one of the great wisdoms of the supply chain architecture of today. And so it, today's dynamic environment is gonna rely on the expertise of China's supply chain expertise more than ever.

(Voice-over)
Before Huang’s visit, Nvidia’s market cap surpassed $4 trillion on July 9, becoming the world’s first company to reach that mark. The day before the Expo, Huang announced that U.S. regulators had approved export licenses for Nvidia’s H20 chips to China.

Jensen Huang:
I’m announcing that the U.S. government has approved filing licenses to start shipping H20s. We will start selling H20s to the Chinese market very soon, and I’m very happy about that—very good news.

(Voice-over)
The H20 chip is Nvidia’s AI accelerator designed for China, with slightly reduced performance compared to the H100. While it’s adequate for vertical-model training and inference, it cannot support trillion-parameter model training. The U.S. had banned H20 exports to China in April, causing Nvidia’s stock to briefly drop nearly 7%.

Host:
Some say it misses Chinese market demands; some worry it pressures domestic innovation. What’s your perspective?

Jensen Huang:
There is no way to stop the mess. The pace of domestic innovation. Of course, I believe that video can make a great contribution. AI is a very complicated stack. It's a very complicated stack of cake. Underneath are chips, then there are systems, networking technology, AI infrastructure, software, AI algorithm and then the applications and services on top. That entire stack is extraordinarily complex. On the one hand, it requires all of the innovation across that stack to advance AI. But if each layer is not moving as fast, the engineers are so smart to innovate at the layer above or below, yeah, to make up for, and the entire stack moves forward.

Jensen Huang:
And that's one of the reasons why you have to admire the incredible innovation of a company called Deep Seek, their model, called R1, is genuinely innovative. It rearchitected many of the ways that the models, am models operate so that it can take advantage of the H20 architecture. And so that's a very innovative thing. As a result, they achieved world class results, even though they were built on h twents. And so researchers and developers, they could adjust to each one of the layers.

Jensen Huang:
I have a lot of optimism and confidence in the innovation capabilities of China to adapt to whatever resources they have.Now remember, H20, although it isn't the most advanced that Nvidia provides, is still extraordinary in terms of capability.You know, it is the architecture that defined, that created, if you will, the AI revolution.And so today, it's still extraordinarily good models like DeepSeek, Alibaba Tencent .

(Voice-over)
Huang mentioned 11 Chinese companies by name during his speech.

Jensen Huang:
This year was very big, and it highlighted... (laughs)

(Voice-over)
In the afternoon, Huang held a nearly one-hour media Q&A, where he highlighted Chinese companies’ innovation and Nvidia’s cooperation with China as key topics.

Jensen Huang:
The electric vehicles in China are incredible. Would you guys all agree? I think I saw Lei Jun the other day. I saw Lei Jun the other day and he showed me his new car. All the technology is incredible. And you buy it? I would love to. It's unfortunately not available in United States, but that's our misfortune, not yours. The, I would say that the electric vehicles in China are probably, in the last five years, the most surprising to the world in terms of the advance.

(Voice-over)
At the Expo, in addition to the H20, Huang revealed a new graphics card called the “RTX Pro,” designed for computer graphics, digital twins, and AI.

Host:
Assuming no U.S. export controls, can Nvidia supply its newest and highest chips to China? Who will suffer, who will benefit?

Jensen Huang:
Those things are hard to say. But one of the things I would say, if not for constraints and challenges, innovation and new invention usually do not emerge. The deep sea R1, the Alibaba Q1, Moonshot, Kimi, these architectures are truly innovative and oftentimes it comes from a constrained environment where there's pressure, great ideas come out.

(Voice-over)
In May, Huang said export restrictions had nearly halved Nvidia’s China market share. He repeatedly called for easing tech export controls to allow U.S. firms to access the world’s largest semiconductor market fairly.

Host:
How important is China’s market for you?

Jensen Huang:
China is not one of many markets. China is a singular unique market. The dynamics of this market, the innovation, the dynamism, the pace of this market, this industry is simply singular. We've been here for 30 years. I came to China long before most of the high tech companies were here. Even at the time, the only technology company was legend and great wall and many friends of mine that have grown up in the PC industry together. I like highlight some of my great friends here, Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi, BYD……

Host:
During this visit, did you meet Lei Jun?

Jensen Huang:
We've been cooperating for a long time since the beginning of Xiaomi, and we used to build phones together.Today, working on AI together, of course, and the software for autonomous vehicles.And there's a whole bunch of things we're working on together.

Jensen Huang:
This market is both dynamic, insanely innovative with brilliant engineers.It has one of the world's largest population of computer scientists.The only other population this large is in United States and the population of end consumers is extremely large. This is not a normal market. This is a very unique market. As a technology provider, we need customers. All providers need customers, and this marketplace is very unique. You can't be complacent about that. And the unintended consequences, the long term consequences of not participating in the China market, you know, is unknown, but I doubt that it's positive. This is an extraordinary time because this is the beginning of a brand new technology revolution, probably the greatest technology revolution of all time, the automated production of intelligence, artificial intelligence. And it is very clear now it is going to create very large industries. And this is an extraordinarily important technology with such an incredible opportunity.

(Voice-over)
NVIDIA was born out of Jensen Huang’s ability to seize a key wave of opportunity brought by advances in computing technology. Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang moved to Thailand with his family at the age of five, and then to the United States at ten. After earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he founded NVIDIA in 1993.

In 1999, NVIDIA invented the GPU, making real-time programmable shading possible—a breakthrough that not only defined modern computer graphics but also paved the way for revolutionary parallel computing. Before NVIDIA popularized GPU-based parallel computing, mainstream computing architectures relied heavily on CPU-based serial processing. Although many companies had attempted to build parallel computing architectures, they failed. As a young startup, NVIDIA chose to focus squarely on parallel computing, and ultimately, the GPU became the foundation of its success.

Jensen Huang:
Computer science is a fairly new science. Physical sciences, chemical sciences, chemistry, physics, biology, quantum, there's a whole lot of different fields of sciences that are quite long. Maybe they're 300 years old, maybe they're 200 years old, they're hundred years old. But computer science is fairly new.

Computer science is my generation. And it wasn't until my generation that the concept of writing software was even considered a science. Before us, the last 60 years was really dictated by general purpose computing and the concept call Morse lock. This fundamental fabric of computer architecture has really defined the algorithms that ended up on top. And video is quite unique in the architecture that we created, and the architecture reshaped all the algorithms that set on top of our computer. And that reshaping resulted in different capabilities, different methodologies, you know, whole bunch of different things.

Computing is the single most important instrument, impactful instrument of society, every society. And we've now reinvented it and created a whole new industry called artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence or intelligence is not a niche capability for a specialized product. It is foundational to every society, every industry, every company, every product. Intelligence or artificial intelligence is going to be an infrastructure fundamental to every country and society, as fundamental as electricity, as internet is today. It is going to be much bigger than both.

(Voice-over)
In 2012, the AlexNet team discovered that using Nvidia GPUs dramatically improved CNN training speed, coinciding with rising AI compute demand. Huang recognized this shift and refocused the company on AI chips.

Jensen Huang:
This is a unique moment for the world. I don't kind of remember any moment like this ever. Why do we say so? I don't remember the last time a technology of this impact has been invented. Give me one example of another time and another technology that is top of mind of every national leader everywhere in the world, every technology leader, every company leader, practically every human. I don't remember ever anything like it. This is extraordinary. There's no way to think about it as extraordinary impact already. And we have to recognize our place in the world today and not be complacent, to respect the opportunity, to be grateful of the opportunity and do our best in service of that opportunity.

Host:
What is this new world?

Jensen Huang:
Enjoy a capability that used to be, you know, quite arduous for us. This is no different than all of a sudden we can all run faster then any human can run. You know, all of us can run 60,70,80 miles per hour. All of us can fly now. No humans could fly before.

In no time in history has there been a technology that could lift everyone. Maybe you didn't have a college degree at all. Maybe you only received a high school degree. Maybe you know nothing about a new field of applications that you would like to learn about, maybe digital biology. In my case, maybe you're not a very good artist, but you would like to be able to express your ideas. Maybe you don't know, you're not an excellent writer, but you would love to be able to tell stories all of a sudden because of AI, all of our capabilities are boosted simultaneously. It is the greatest equalizer ever. And so for people who have found that technology had not served them in the past because technology was hard to use. Today's technology with artificial intelligence is accessible and it's easy to use. And so I hope that everybody engages AI, and we take the opportunity to lift everyone. Can you jump? Can you dance?

Well, I think I just want to let you know I am the keynote presenter. So I need you. I need you to behave for a few seconds. I need you to behave for few seconds. Could you sit? Hey, you know what we should do? Let's take a picture of everybody. Yeah. Bang Bang.

(Voice-over)
Nvidia is now a mainstream AI powerhouse. Yet AI’s rise has triggered fierce competition. According to IDC, China’s data-center acceleration card share jumped from 14% in 2023 to 34.6% in 2024—a sign of shifting dynamics after chip restrictions.

Jensen Huang:
If we're not here, the local market will be served. And there are innovative companies. Huawei, of course, is not only innovative, this is a company with extraordinary scale and might. Huawei is a much bigger company than we are in scale, human scale and technical capability there, broad and deep. Anyone ever looks at, examines a Huawei phone, they'll understand it. The miracle of the technology has been assembled. If you ever looked at a Huawei now, they're incredibly good at autonomous vehicles. Their AI technology is quite extraordinary. So in this is a company that with a great chip design capability, system design, system software. But we're not here. This market will be served by Chinese innovators, chip companies, Huawei, of course, and many cloud service providers will build their own chips. And so I think the market, China's AI market will advance with or without Invidia. If we're not here, Huawei will find a way. That's my confidence in a human innovation. If there's a will, there's a way.

There is every reason to respect and admire Huawei's achievements. This is an extraordinary technology company, and whatever they decide to dedicate themselves to and put their mind to, they will surely do well. Huawei.

Host:
Competitor or partner?

Jensen Huang:
First of all, the company philosophy and culture and what they've overcome and setbacks, what they've achieved and built, there's nothing you can possibly say aside from extraordinary, and they should be admired for their achievements.

The company still remain intensely competitive. They're our competitors, but you could still have admiration and respect and have great relationships with people you compete with or competitors, not enemies. But the world is large, and I hoped we'll have an opportunity to compete for many years to come. But my feelings toward them are that admiration and respect and competitive. I think the big idea here is that there are companies that compete, there are nations that compete and all of that coexist at the same time.

(Voice-over)

On January 17th, during a fireside chat at the Chain Expo, Jensen Huang engaged in a deep conversation with Dr. Wang Jian, Director of the Zhijiang Laboratory and founder of Alibaba Cloud. Their discussion spanned from graphics processors and GPUs to open-source models for artificial general intelligence, and even the intersection of AI and bioengineering. Together, they reflected on the evolution of artificial intelligence and boldly envisioned where the next wave of technological revolution might emerge.

Jensen Huang
AI's ability to understand and generate information, as we’re seeing now, is incredible. This capability is called reasoning. And the reason why reasoning is so effective, so powerful, is that AI can understand and solve problems it has never encountered before—just like humans. The next frontier is what we call physical AI.

Host:
Once you said you wake up with anxiety and concerns—but also confidence and pride. Why?

Jensen Huang:
We see, you know, there's self driving cars all over China and autonomous vehicles. Advances are happening faster here than just by anywhere. Xpeng has it, Li Auto has it, Neo has it, Xiaomi has it, BYD has it. And so the capabilities of fusing artificial intelligence and software and mechanical systems is a very natural capability of Chinese. And so this is an extraordinary opportunity for China, actually.

(Voice-over)
In recent years, NVIDIA has continued to expand its R&D investment in China, establishing AI innovation centers in both Shanghai and Beijing, and maintaining deep partnerships with numerous Chinese companies. According to Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's workforce in China has grown to nearly 4,000 employees, spanning research and development, sales, technical support, and other areas.

Jensen Huang:

Many of my Chinese employees have been with us for over two decades, we have offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and I love coming every year to help them celebrate Chinese New Year and videos growing their extraordinary talent here. And we also still have, you know, have great partners here and great customers here that I hope to serve.

And so I'm optimistic about our opportunities here in China. I'm optimistic that our two countries will find a way of competing and cooperating in a way that enables American companies like myself to continue to be able to prosper in and serving this market. And so I'm optimistic about those things, and my Chinese employees have contributed greatly to the creation of one of the world's great companies, and I'm very proud of our job, singular to do our job, to do the things we can control, which is the advance the technology the best we can, to cultivate and serve ecosystems of developers and researchers all around the world, to be able to serve markets that were allowed to serve, you know, complying with regulations and laws of every country, and there are many laws and many regulations in so many different countries, and we just have to comply with them all. And I believe that there is, at the center of that, there is still the possibility of building an extraordinarily great company that is in service of what an extraordinary time, in service of what is an extraordinary technology and in service of countries and industries and companies all around the world.

(Voice-over)

From a graphics card company beloved by gamers to today’s leading force in defining the compute infrastructure of the AI era, NVIDIA’s transformation has not come without hardship—it faced near bankruptcy twice along the way. With both chip and AI technology evolving at a breakneck pace, Jensen Huang admits he can’t afford to relax—and doesn’t dare to.

Host:

You like competition?

Jensen Huang:

I love competition. The generation of CEO before me, they were battle hardened. They described competition and building companies like war. I don't. We're not.

Host:

Why you don't?

Jensen Huang:

Because we're not in war. Because we're compete. We're competing. And as it turns out, you need competition to create your market. You need competition to create a future for both. There are no great markets where there are no competition. And so by definition, if you want markets, if you want prosperity, you want growth, competition goes along with it. And so I'm of the, a core value believe that it is possible to be in service of the market in the industry and to help everyone grow. And as a result, you grow as a benefit.

And I respect my competitors and I've got no trouble enjoying their company. And video competes with many companies in the world in a lot of ways. Most of my customers compete with me, and we have no trouble cooperating with them still. And so I think it's in this world today where everything is so interdependent and we rely on each other, I rely on my competitors for many things. For example, I buy a lot of Intel CPUs and I use cloud services from companies who build chips to compete with me. And so I think in a lot of ways, we're so interdependent, it is really prudent to allow for spaces to compete and to recognize that their places were simply gonna compete. And we compete with great spirit. And then there areas where we will cooperate, lots and lots of areas where we will cooperate and look for ways to enjoy each other's cooperation, respect each other's competition and always keep looking for more cooperation. The future is unknown to everybody, and it's an opportunity for everyone. And so I wake up every morning as early as I can to keep working for the future and take nothing for granted.

Host:

And once in an interview, you said you get up with anxiety and concerns. Hum, but without confident and proud. Why?

Jensen Huang:

I don't know. I always feel like we're going out of business. Maybe it's because when I found it in video, we're literally going out of business all the time. And I'm a rare founder that has been at the company at the very beginning and still here today. I don't think a founder has ever seen their company go from zero to a trillion dollars before. And so I've had the benefit of keeping all of those feelings with me. All of the early days feelings have never left me. And I take nothing for granted. And I'm never complacent. I'm always staying alert. I always think that just as we've done something great, somebody else could do something great. And I can't help but wanting Invidia to do more, and I can't help but believing that we can do so much more. I still feel like I'm going out of business everyday, and that will never leave my system, and I hope it doesn't hum. And so I'm gonna try to get to the future first. But if somebody else does, so be it. I'll try to catch up.

(Voice-over)

At NVIDIA’s internal meetings, Jensen Huang often opens with a stark reminder: “We’re only 30 days away from bankruptcy.” His demanding leadership style has become a defining trait. He firmly believes that failure must be confronted openly, often pointing out specific mistakes in public so the whole team can learn from them. Yet outside of work, Huang reveals a completely different side—passionate, energetic, full of humor, and rarely showing the sternness he’s known for at the office. He has publicly stated multiple times that he plans to keep working until the age of 80—or even beyond.

Host:
What's the fun of being a CEO?

Jensen Huang:
Most of time being CEO is not that fun, to be honest. You're under pressure all the time. I've been under pressure for 33 years, every single day, every single minute. And I felt the burden of our company and our customers and our market every single second of 33 years that's never left me, not even for one moment. So that's not always fun. It's fun to see the achievements of our company and my employees, and it's fun to see the achievements of my partners and customers.

It was fun to see Lei Jun's new car and that he built it and what an amazing achievement it was in such a short time. It's fun for me when, as you know, Sam came up with the ChatGPT 0,1 and now 0,3, it's fun for me to see cinder in this team, Dennis and a man come up with Gemini Pro. It's fun for me to see Elon coming up with rock and his latest version, rock for, you know, it's fun for me. I, I enjoy that. I enjoy seeing that I was somehow, you know, slightly involved and that I was may able to make a contribution. I love seeing other people succeed and do things and that I'm somehow involved in it. But otherwise, being CEO is high pressure, hard work every single day.

Host:

But you still want to do it into your 80s?

Jensen Huang:

I should do it because I think I'm best person for the job. And until that's not true, I should do it.