Washington is threatening to sanction Chinese AI models. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just told Axios something very different. In an exclusive interview in Fort Worth, Texas on July 21, Huang said US companies should be "absolutely" allowed to use open-source Chinese AI models. He went further: the odds that Chinese firms drive American companies out of business are zero.
Huang's answer was one word: "Absolutely." US firms should be allowed to use Chinese AI.
Huang's comments read like a direct warning to hawks in Washington pushing for a ban. The trigger was Moonshot AI's July 16 release of Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model and now the world's largest open-source system. Its aggressive pricing and upcoming open-weight downloads set off the sharpest wave of AI panic since DeepSeek rattled markets in early 2025. Kimi K3 beat Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on multiple benchmarks, and chip stocks including Nvidia sold off on fears that cheaper, more efficient models would undercut the massive global bet on AI infrastructure.
The fallout came fast. US Treasury Secretary Bessent and Trade Representative Greer both spoke out the same day. Bessent told Fox Business that US authorities had found watermarks from American large language models embedded in several Chinese AI systems, calling it "unacceptable" and promising an investigation. Greer said Washington would examine whether China gained its edge through unfair means.
Bessent: “US watermarks found in Chinese AI models.” An investigation is coming
US media reported earlier that the White House is weighing a new executive order to restrict open-source AI, particularly systems from Chinese companies. The Commerce Department had already considered adding several Chinese AI labs to its Entity List last year.
Huang's logic cuts the other way. "The market misunderstood the impact of DeepSeek the first time," he told Axios, adding that Wall Street has "misunderstood the impact of Kimi again this time."
Kimi K3's launch rattled the entire AI industry.
Free, cheap open-source models, according to Huang, let AI reach far more consumers and businesses. That, he argued, drives strong demand for chips, data centers and computing power. "Free AI should be great for hardware," Huang said. "Free AI should be great for chips. Free AI should be great for data centers."
OpenAI and Anthropic have no reason to fear open models either, in Huang's view. Open-source systems expose more people to AI for the first time, which expands the whole market. Many of those users, he added, will still end up paying for the reliability and convenience of closed commercial services.
On security, Huang rejected the idea that downloading a Chinese model opens a backdoor to Beijing. Companies can fully customize and control access inside secure sandbox environments, he said.
Wong argued openness actually works the other way: outside researchers can inspect models, spot weaknesses and build defenses. "If everything just becomes one single model, one single point of attack, one single source of failure, I think the world is much, much more vulnerable."
Huang also called on Anthropic to open up its restricted cybersecurity model, Claude Mythos, rather than keep it locked down. "Holding Anthropic back is not in the benefit of the United States," he said, "Open models are available anyhow. So I think: Let Anthropic run."
On the US-China AI race, Huang staked out a position sharply at odds with Washington's. He rejected the idea that AI competition has a finish line. "We're going to continue to use AI forever," he said. "The United States is going to be here for a long time. China's going to be here for a long time."
Bloomberg cited several analysts drawing a contrast with the 2018 ban on Chinese 5G equipment. Freely downloadable, highly customizable software models have already embedded themselves deep in Silicon Valley's ecosystem. On OpenRouter, a platform offering access to multiple AI models, Chinese models now account for nearly 60% of token usage by US companies.
The adoption numbers back that up. DoorDash, Airbnb and Germany's Siemens have all shifted to Chinese models. More than 80% of US AI startups now make heavy use of Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Zhipu's GLM, with usage share holding above 30%, up from just 11% a year ago.
Nathan Lambert, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, put it bluntly: any form of ban would be a serious mistake for AI's long-term development.
Morgan Stanley believes the growth cycle in global AI computing demand is far from over. Bernstein estimates that even if Kimi K3 cuts single-run training costs by roughly 40%, competitive pressure pushing firms to double their training frequency could still lift total computing demand by around 20%.
Mao Paishou
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, energy costs in Germany, a country heavily reliant on Russian natural gas, spun instantly out of control. Electricity prices at one point surged sevenfold, forcing ordinary people to dream up all manner of clever tricks to save on their power bills. One of those tricks has become a distinctive sight on German streets: the "balcony solar" system.
To cut power bills, Germans turned balconies into power plants.
"Balkonkraftwerk": Miracles On Balconies
This simple generating setup costs just a few hundred euros, yet more than 1.33 million units have been installed across Germany in three years. The German government has even amended the law, granting tenants with no rooftop of their own priority installation rights.
What Germans call the "Balkonkraftwerk", or "balcony power plant", is actually just one or two solar panels hung outside the railing, an inverter the size of a shoebox, and a plug that goes into a household socket. The current then flows back into the home: the inverter sets its output voltage slightly higher than the 230V household supply, so solar power feeds in reverse into the wiring. A small storage battery can be added to keep the power coming at night.
The "Balkonkraftwerk": railing-hung panels, a shoebox-sized inverter, one plug.
The principle is not complicated. It works rather like a water supply system. Pipes maintain a steady pressure; turn on the tap and the pressure difference pushes the water out. The grid works the same way. China's standard household voltage is 220V and Germany's is 230V. The inverter in a balcony photovoltaic module simply nudges its output voltage slightly above the socket voltage, pushing solar power back in.
Once the current enters the socket, it is consumed on the spot, "drunk up" by the appliances at home. Less electricity is drawn from the grid, and the meter turns more slowly. If no appliances are running, then in areas where bidirectional metering is permitted, the surplus power flows out of the home along the mains line and back into the grid.
A Few Hundred Euros, Real Money Back
A "balcony power plant" sells for roughly 200 to 500 euros, depending on output. The best-selling 800W model goes for about 350 euros. A solar-plus-storage package with a battery costs between 800 and 1,500 euros.
A granny who lives in Stuttgart finds a 300W system enough to cover her basic needs: lighting, the router and electric fans. She now checks the next day's sunshine forecast every evening. If the sun will be out, she schedules a bike charge or runs the dishwasher. "Save whatever you can," she says.
Granny's 300W system covers her lights, router and fans.
Her nightly ritual: the sunshine forecast. "Save whatever you can."
Weyland, a young man in the northern city of Kiel, hung two panels with a combined output of 600W on the balcony of his rented apartment. In good weather they cover half of his daily electricity use. The whole system cost under 500 euros, yet saves him more than 90 euros a year, a payback period of about five years. These days he spends his time glued to the app, watching the generation figures roll in.
Kiel renter Weyland's two balcony panels total 600W.
In southern Germany, where the sunshine is better, a standard 800W system generates about 750 to 850 kWh a year. At last year's average price of 0.39 euros per kWh, that puts up to 295 to 334 euros a year back in the user's pocket.
For an ordinary household consuming 3,000 kWh a year, saving is about 25 to 28 percent. A single-person household using around 1,500 kWh could ideally save 50 to 57 percent.
No Roof? No Problem
Europe used to put solar panels on rooftops. But more than half of Germany's population lives in rented housing, the highest share in the EU. That means no roof, no land, nowhere to put panels, and no eligibility for the complicated installation and grid-connection approval process.
No roof, no problem: balcony solar is the tenant's lifesaver.
That was when Chinese manufacturers stepped up, Anker Innovations, EcoFlow and Zendure among them. They launched lightweight, low-cost balcony solar kits that skip the tedious paperwork and are far easier to use.
Panels have been slimmed down from the traditional 20kg to just 3 to 5kg. Hook-style railing clamps fix them in place with a few screws. Some models can simply be lashed on with metal cable ties, and they can be taken down easily when moving.
Voltage has dropped from the 600V to 1,000V high-voltage direct current of rooftop solar to a safe 30V to 60V. The plug goes straight into an ordinary socket, and monitoring is done entirely through an app. Installation and use are virtually "zero-threshold". German young people love it. Chinese manufacturers have turned solar "engineering" into a consumer electronics product for everyone.
Berlin Gives the Green Light
The German government has also given the green light. A legislative amendment in May 2024 allows self-installation without prior approval; simple registration afterwards is enough. Balcony solar is now a "privileged installation", on par with disabled-access facilities and EV charging points. Landlords and owners' committees may not block installations on grounds such as "spoiling the view". A landlord who wants to refuse must prove a safety hazard; if the tenant can fix the hazard, the installation goes ahead anyway. The government also waived the 19 percent VAT, and cities including Berlin and Stuttgart have rolled out dedicated subsidies of up to 500 euros. All income from generation is exempt from personal income tax.
With the government "loosening the reins", balcony solar has grown rapidly. Around 260,000 units were added in 2023. The figure soared to 435,000 in 2024, and another 430,000 or so were registered in 2025. That is 1.1 million units installed at lightning speed in three years. By May this year, cumulative installations had reached 1.33 million, the equivalent of more than a thousand German households signing up every day.
Policy green light: install first, register afterwards.
Other European countries have followed suit. The Netherlands had reached 600,000 cumulative installations by the end of 2025, the highest penetration after Germany, with nearly 5 percent of households equipped. Austria has installed 250,000 units, Italy 200,000 and Belgium 150,000.
Made in China, Invisible at Home
Of the solar panels imported into Europe, 98 percent come from China, and 70 percent of micro-inverters are Chinese-supplied. In balcony energy storage, Chinese companies had already secured the first seven places of the top ten best-seller spots in Europe as early as the third quarter of 2024. Industry forecasts see global installed balcony solar capacity exceeding 50 gigawatts by 2030, with China likely to claim more than 40 percent of it.
Yet in China itself, these products are practically invisible in cities. For one thing, electricity in China is genuinely cheap. For another, China follows a "centralized plus distributed" path.
The northwest builds gigawatt-scale centralized solar bases across deserts and the Gobi on a massive scale, using ultra-high-voltage transmission to solve the geographic mismatch. The east develops distributed solar on factory and detached-house rooftops. Rural rooftops easily run to tens or even hundreds of square meters, accommodating 20kW to 50kW systems. That is dozens of times the generating capacity of balcony solar.
With no domestic demand to speak of, Chinese companies have nonetheless struck overseas demand with pinpoint precision and taken command of the global balcony solar market. The same story has played out with saddle-style window air conditioners, fully automatic lawnmowers, electric-assist bicycles and AI game-tracking cameras. To Western politicians, China's technological rise is a threat. But to ordinary people abroad, Chinese products have made life better, time and again.
