Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has intensified his warnings about the United States falling behind China in the race for artificial intelligence dominance, saying the East Asian nation could soon pull ahead.

“China is going to win the AI race,” Huang told the Financial Times on the sidelines of the media outlet’s Future of AI Summit on Wednesday.

His blunt remarks underscored the shrinking technological gap between the world’s two largest economies, locked in both a trade war and a battle for AI supremacy.

Huang told the FT that “cynicism” is holding the West back — and that it needs “more optimism” to compete.

He pointed to a growing wave of AI regulations emerging across US states, warning that too many new rules could stifle innovation.

By contrast, China’s government energy subsidies make it cheaper for local tech companies to power homegrown AI chips, he said.

“Power is free,” he said.

Later on Wednesday, Huang reiterated his position in a post on X: “As I have long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI. It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.”

Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, has faced mounting pressure from US policymakers to limit sales of its cutting-edge semiconductors to Chinese firms.

At Nvidia’s GTC in Washington last month, Huang said the US must stay engaged with China’s developer community if it hopes to maintain its AI edge.

“We want the world to be built on American tech stack,” Huang said at the time.

“But we also need to be in China to win their developers. A policy that causes America to lose half of the world’s AI developers is not beneficial long term, it hurts us more,” he said.

On Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration does not plan to let Nvidia sell its most advanced Blackwell chips to China.

In May, Huang said the US crackdown on chip exports to China — which have hit Nvidia’s business hard — was “a failure” as the restrictions were driving Chinese tech firms to accelerate their own AI developments.