Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly recognized the growing global influence of Chinese AI models, specifically highlighting DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen as standout performers in the open-source AI ecosystem.
During Nvidia's May 28 earnings call, Huang stated, "DeepSeek and [Alibaba's] Qwen from China are among the best open-source AI models released freely. They've gained traction across the U.S., Europe and beyond."
This acknowledgment comes at a significant moment, as DeepSeek recently released its R1-0528 model upgrade, which demonstrates substantial improvements in reasoning capabilities. According to technical benchmarks, the upgraded model's performance now approaches that of proprietary models like OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. On the AIME 2025 math test, DeepSeek-R1-0528's accuracy jumped from 70% to 87.5%, while its coding performance on LiveCodeBench rose from 63.5% to 73.3%.
What makes these achievements particularly notable is that DeepSeek has accomplished this while using significantly fewer computational resources than its US counterparts. This efficiency has sent shockwaves through the tech industry, with DeepSeek's January release wiping nearly $600 billion from Nvidia's market value in a single day as investors questioned whether major US tech companies were overspending on AI infrastructure.
Similarly, Alibaba's Qwen has become one of the world's most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and spawning more than 100,000 derivative models on the Hugging Face platform. The latest Qwen3 models support 119 languages and were trained on a dataset of over 36 trillion tokens.
Huang's comments reflect a complex reality for Nvidia, which has criticized US export controls that limit its ability to sell advanced chips to China. During the same earnings call, Huang argued that keeping Chinese open-source models running on Nvidia chips provides US firms with valuable insight into global AI development trends, stating, "US platforms must remain the preferred platform for open-source AI. America wins when models like DeepSeek and Qwen run best on American infrastructure."