Open source was “extremely powerful” for AI innovation and Chinese firms offer the “best open reasoning models”, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in Beijing on Thursday, ahead of the expected resumption of the company’s H20 chip sales to China.

Open source allows not just the contribution of each company but the combined resource of an ecosystem, which is what was “very clever about open source engineering here in China”, Huang said at the China International Supply Chain Expo.

DeepSeek’s models, Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen and Chinese start-up Moonshot’s Kimi were “the best open reasoning models in the world today,” and were “very advanced”, Huang said during a fireside chat with Wang Jian, founder of Alibaba Cloud, the Chinese e-commerce giant’s AI and cloud unit.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

While Huang praised the “open source” movement in China, he also highlighted the global implications of the approach whereby companies share their research and collaborate to advance artificial intelligence technology.

“Don’t forget that open source has many global implications. Not only did the open source models help the Chinese ecosystem, [they are] helping ecosystems around the world,” Huang said.