Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, stated on Thursday in a CNBC interview that China's rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are significantly supported by its substantial holdings of Nvidia's (NVDA, Financials) Nvidia H100 GPUs, intensifying the competition with the United States.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wang underlined that DeepSeek, a top Chinese AI lab, published a novel model on Christmas Day and then DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning-oriented AI model directly rival to OpenAI's newly published o1 model.
Emphasizing that China has a somewhat bigger number of Nvidia H100 GPUs, which are essential for constructing sophisticated AI models, Wang defined the U.S.-China competition in artificial intelligence as an "AI war". He noted that China has had strong access to these potent artificial intelligence processors in spite of U.S. export restrictions, therefore allowing notable advancement in its AI industry. Thanks to this access, Chinese artificial intelligence models have been able to reach performance standards either on par with or above the top American models, claims Wang.
Moreover, Wang anticipated that, in line with expectations for the generative AI market, the AI sector would value $1 trillion during the next decade. He also voiced his conviction that two to four years—a period of time still hotly contested among AI professionals—are enough to reach artificial general intelligence.
Wang underlined the need of the United States expanding its computing capability and infrastructure if it is to maintain its leadership on the global scene. Emphasizing the need of major investment and development to sustain ongoing growth and innovation in the American AI industry, he said, "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom."
