Jensen Huang, head of the American chipmaker, said the Biden-era controls were a “failure” that had cost his and other U.S. companies billions of dollars in sales.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The head of American chipmaker Nvidia praised President Donald Trump’s move to modify U.S. curbs on the export of artificial intelligence chips to China, saying Wednesday that the Biden-era controls were a “failure” that had cost his and other U.S. companies billions of dollars in sales.

Under former President Joe Biden, the United States rolled out a three-tiered system of export curbs on advanced chips aimed at regulating the global diffusion of AI, blocking China entirely. While Biden said the curbs were necessary to slow China’s development of technology that could have military applications, critics said they could undermine U.S. tech leadership.

The Trump administration said last week that it plans to rescind some of those curbs and replace them with its own restrictions.

Nvidia’s billionaire chief executive, Jensen Huang, said his company controls 50% of the market in China today, compared with almost 95% at the start of the Biden administration in 2021.

“All in all, the export control was a failure,” he told reporters on the sidelines of Computex, a top technology trade show in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, saying the curbs were based on the “fundamentally flawed” assumption that the U.S. is the only source of AI technology.

Huang, 62, said Chinese companies blocked from buying American products had instead turned to local sources such as Chinese tech giant Huawei, and that they had been spurred to make advances with as little outside help as possible.

“The local companies are very, very talented and very determined,” Huang said, “and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna208153