“Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary is calling on U.S. policymakers to reverse export restrictions on artificial intelligence chips, arguing that blocking sales to adversaries like China could backfire by allowing competitors to establish their semiconductor ecosystems.
What Happened: Speaking on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast, O’Leary drew parallels between Apple Inc.’s AAPL strategy under Steve Jobs and the current AI chip battle involving Nvidia Corp. NVDA. He described the chip as the “queen bee” that creates value through a surrounding community of programmers and developers.
“The computer, the chip is the queen bee,” O’Leary said. “But it has no value without the honeybees, which are the programmers around it that form a community that spend all of their energy writing code that works with the queen bee.”
O’Leary warned that current U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors to China and Russia represent “bad policy” that could allow adversaries to develop competing platforms.
He specifically cited concerns about Huawei Technologies gaining ground while American companies like Nvidia face restricted market access.
“The minute you shut down a market and your adversary sends their queen bee in, which is Huawei, we can’t let that happen,” O’Leary stated. He suggested keeping adversaries “one generation behind” in chip technology rather than completely cutting off access.
Why It Matters: The comments come as the Trump administration considers new restrictions on AI chip exports to Malaysia and Thailand to prevent indirect supply routes to China. A draft Commerce Department rule aims to curb semiconductor smuggling through Southeast Asian intermediaries.
Nvidia has already removed China from its revenue guidance after export controls cost the company $2.5 billion in first-quarter revenue. CEO Jensen Huang told CNN that the company will no longer include China in forecasts due to ongoing restrictions.
Recent intelligence reports suggest that Chinese AI company DeepSeek has found workarounds to access large volumes of Nvidia’s H100 chips despite export bans. A senior State Department official told Reuters that DeepSeek supports China’s military and intelligence operations.
O’Leary’s advocacy reflects broader concerns among tech investors about losing global AI leadership. The veteran entrepreneur, who sold his educational software company SoftKey to Mattel for $3.7 billion in 1999, emphasized that restricting chip sales could ultimately benefit competitors.
“You create the hive with the queen in the middle,” O’Leary explained. “You convince every bee around to make the honey, which is the software, and that is the AI in this case.”
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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