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The chip manufacturer Nvidia might be one of the most valuable companies in history<\/a> for now, but that could change in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n In a recent appearance<\/a> on the podcast \u201cBG2,\u201d Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang agonized that China is now \u201cnanoseconds behind\u201d US chipmakers, the companies building the hardware undergirding the multi-billion dollar AI boom.<\/p>\n Just weeks ago, China\u2019s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced a ban<\/a> on large Chinese tech firms purchasing Nvidia chips. The ban follows a broader effort by Chinese lawmakers to lessen dependency on foreign companies and promote domestic manufacturing \u2014 a similar goal to the worker-led \u201cKeep it Made in America<\/a>\u201d movement of 2009.<\/p>\n For Huang, the loss of Chinese buyers is a major threat. Not only is Nvidia losing one of its most valuable markets<\/a>, but it\u2019s also gaining a powerful competitor<\/a> that threatens its near-monopoly on the global chip trade.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re up against a formidable, innovative, hungry, fast-moving, underregulated [competitor],\u201d Huang stewed. \u201cThis is a vibrant, entrepreneurial, high-tech, modern industry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we need to do as a country,\u201d the CEO continued, \u201cis to enable our technology industry, which today is our national treasure\u2026 to go and proliferate the technology around the world. So that we can have the world to be built on top of American technology, so we can maximize our economic success, our geopolitical influence.\u201d<\/p>\n Nvidia isn\u2019t the only Western company trembling about the increasingly independent<\/a> PRC, but it is a powerful bellwether. In fact, Huang\u2019s lust for economic superiority and geopolitical dominance over China follows over 125 years of US meddling in the country\u2019s affairs<\/a>. <\/p>\n When it became clear that post-revolutionary China would resist Western colonialization, the US\u2019 response was to exert immense economic pressure<\/a> on the nation. By 1962, president John F. Kennedy\u2019s foreign policy advisor Walt Rostow was able to brag that a US-led trade embargo was devastating the PRC<\/a>, delaying its economic development for at least \u201ctens of years.\u201d<\/p>\n Now the chickens have come home to roost. For decades, China has been running an experiment to allow limited foreign investment into the country, a strategy known as \u201creform and opening up<\/a>.\u201d Throughout this process, China\u2019s political leadership maintained strict regulations<\/a> over the rights of foreign companies, leveraging the country\u2019s vast workforce to avoid the economic disasters which came to define similar projects<\/a> in Russia and the former Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n While an entire generation in China was subjected to horrifying work conditions<\/a> typical of other nations exploited by international corporations, the People\u2019s Republic in turn gained access<\/a> to the cutting-edge technologies of the West. It has since used those resources to develop an increasingly independent tech industry which now threatens the once-dominant US, while lifting some 800 million people<\/a> out of poverty.<\/p>\n In other words, Nvidia\u2019s CEO seems to be feeling the crunch of China\u2019s long-term strategy for economic independence. How this chip competition looks a year from now is difficult to say \u2014 but as Huang shrugs off the best efforts of Intel and AMD, it\u2019s striking to see China making him nervous.<\/p>\n