Nvidia scandal rocks tech world Web Summit

Allegations of Chinese spying on Nvidia dominated a top world tech conference on Tuesday, with some executives seeing potential opportunities in the turmoil at the US artificial intelligence chip giant.

The start of the Web Summit in Lisbon was overshadowed by the scandal that has engulfed Jensen Huang, boss of the company that dominates the market for chips used in leading AI systems.

He acknowledged an affair, reportedly with a woman whom US intelligence officials suspect of spying for China — a claim Beijing denied.

Nvidia’s shares were down more than 5% on Wall Street in Tuesday afternoon trading.

“Over the short term, there will be turbulence in terms of the stock price, in terms of the management arrangement,” said Larry Li, founder of California-based investment firm Amino Capital.

“But nevertheless, I feel it might be a good time to have other players playing a more important role than Nvidia alone.”

He cited US rivals including Qualcomm, Google and AMD as potential beneficiaries.

Chinese technology executives attending the summit highlighted emerging alternatives to Nvidia.

Nvidia is “basically the foundation of the modern AI but nowadays we have more diverse kinds of chips coming out, not just from America, but also from China,” said YuanKang Zhang, head of strategy and innovation at Chinese company Cloudsky.

“Eventually, we hope it can be a very diverse environment, so the whole industry will not be easily affected by such events,” he told AFP.

Washington has restricted exports of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China since 2022, although rules were later eased to permit sales of lower-end products.

The spying allegations could reignite tensions ahead of US President Donald Trump’s upcoming visit to China and raise the prospect of tighter controls.

Yang Jing, product manager at Chinese AI company ModelBest, said his firm was developing chips with “a lot of new companies” such as Huawei.

From the Nvidia scandal, he said, “there will be effects on our work but it will not destroy it.”

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