Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the U.S. robotics industry will have to rely on China’s supply chain despite the U.S. pioneering the market, as the company bets on physical AI and looks to return to the Chinese market. “I think China is formidable,” Huang said when asked about the country’s rise in the robotics industry during a podcast hosted by Silicon Valley tech executives. “The reason is that their microelectronics, motors, rare earth and magnets – which are foundational to robotics – are the world’s best. So in a lot of ways, our robotics industry relies deeply on their ecosystem and their supply chain,” Huang said on the podcast, which was recorded at Nvidia’s annual GTC event in San Jose, California. He added that although the U.S. “largely invented” the industry, the country got “tired and exhausted” before the emergence of the crucial enabling technology, which was “the brain”.
Huang’s remarks came as embodied intelligence – the integration of artificial intelligence with physical systems – becomes a global buzzword, particularly in China and the U.S. In the latest move to capitalize on global interest in humanoids, China’s Unitree Robotics filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on Shanghai’s Star Market, seeking to raise CNY4.2 billion amid a surge in revenue and profits in 2025. Nvidia is betting on physical AI to expand its revenue stream. At GTC, it launched its “Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint”, an open reference architecture that unifies and automates how training data is generated, augmented and evaluated for physical AI systems. Separately, Huang reaffirmed on the podcast that Nvidia was ready to ship its chips to the Chinese market, signaling that it had cleared regulatory hurdles in both Washington and Beijing for the H200, its second-most powerful AI processor to date.
“As we speak, Nvidia gave up a 95% market share in the second largest market in the world, and we are at 0%. President Trump wants us to get back in there,” Huang said. Nvidia has received approvals from U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to sell the chips to some Chinese companies, Huang said, adding that many companies had already placed orders, putting Nvidia in the position of “cranking up our supply chain again to go ship”. In its latest financial year ended on January 25, Nvidia’s revenue in China was USD19.7 billion, down from USD25 billion a year earlier, the South China Morning Post reports.
