Citrini Analyst: NVIDIA Benefits from China’s Open-Source AI Boom; Long-Term Risk Lies in Compute Independence

Huo Xing Cai Jing reports that on July 23, Citrini analyst Jukan published a post refuting the view that Chinese open-source models are irrelevant to NVIDIA, arguing that the flourishing of Chinese open-source AI is actually reinforcing NVIDIA’s dominance. China continues to use NVIDIA GPUs to train models and releases versions optimized specifically for NVIDIA hardware; thus, for inference, NVIDIA GPUs remain the most advantageous platform for models such as DeepSeek V4 and Kimi K3—no one runs inference for these models on TPUs or Trainium. This protects NVIDIA’s moat in two ways: first, by maintaining its position as the optimal platform in the inference market; second, by indirectly dampening the motivation of hyperscale cloud providers to develop their own ASICs as alternatives to NVIDIA GPUs. Meanwhile, Neocloud providers that rely on NVIDIA GPUs for inference also benefit, as the growth of Chinese open-source models provides them with a sustained source of compute demand. Jukan notes that the real structural risk lies in the long term: if China achieves true compute independence and no longer relies on NVIDIA, the consequences will extend far beyond losing the Chinese market itself. NVIDIA’s dominance would significantly weaken, the relative competitiveness of alternatives such as TPUs and Trainium would increase, and NVIDIA’s Neocloud ecosystem—considered a key strategic asset—would face serious challenges.