Commentary: What if the AI race isn’t about chips at all?

SEOUL: China is going to win the artificial intelligence race, says Jensen Huang. At first glance, it is easy to assume Nvidia’s billionaire founder is just talking his book. Nvidia does stand to gain the most from any narrative that encourages the US to step up its investment in AI or ease regulatory restrictions on its development, thus boosting demand for Nvidia chips. But does he have a point? Not long ago, about a fifth of Nvidia’s data centre revenue came from China. Its fortunes depend on a steady stream of orders for its chips from governments, cloud providers and…