Nvidia boss warns that a hospital is built in 3 days in China, while the US needs 3 years for a data center
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, pictured signing autographs during an economic conference he attended in South Korea on December 31, 2025, PHOTO: Lee Jin-man / AP / Profimedia Images
Although the United States maintains an edge in artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warns that China can build large-scale projects at a breakneck pace, Fortune magazine reports.
“If you want to build a data center here in the United States, from the time you start the work to the operationalization of an AI supercomputer, it probably takes about three years,” Huang said in an audience discussion with John Hamre, president of the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a Washington think tank.
“They (the Chinese) can build a hospital in a weekend,” added Huang, the CEO of the world's most valuable company. At the end of October Nvidia briefly became the first company in history whose market capitalization exceeded 5 trillion (5,000 billion) dollars.
Huang says the speed at which China can build infrastructure is just one of his concerns. He is also concerned about the two countries' comparative ability to support the AI boom.
China has “twice as much energy as we have as a nation, and our economy is bigger than theirs. It makes no sense to me,” said Jensen Huang.
According to him, China's energy capacity continues to grow “in a straight line”, while that of the United States remains relatively constant.
Still, Huang pointed out that Nvidia is “several generations ahead” of China in AI chip technology, technology needed to support demand for the technology and the semiconductor manufacturing process. But he warned that the situation should not cause complacency, adding that “anyone who thinks China can't manufacture is missing an essential point.”
Earlier last month, Huang drew attention for predicting that the world's second-largest economy would win the artificial intelligence race over the US — a message he tempered slightly shortly after, saying in a message shared by Nvidia on social media that Beijing was “nanoseconds behind America” in the race.
Nvidia is just one of the big tech companies pouring billions of dollars into expanding data centers in the United States — an effort that experts say — could top $100 billion in 2026 alone.
Raul Martynek, director of DataBank, a company that partners with tech giants to build data centers, said the average price of a data center is $10 million to $15 million per megawatt (MW), and a typical smaller data center requires 40 MW.
“In the United States, we believe 5 to 7 gigawatts will be commissioned in the next year to support this seemingly insatiable demand for AI,” Martynek told Fortune magazine.
