China Bans Nvidia AI Chips, Pushing for Domestic Alternatives

China blocks sale of Nvidia AI chips

China's Internet regulator has banned the country's biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its domestic industry and compete with the US. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia's tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers, the people said. After receiving the CAC order, the companies told their suppliers to stop the work, the people added. The ban goes beyond earlier guidance from regulators that focused on the H20, Nvidia's other China-only chip widely used for AI. It comes after Chinese regulators concluded that domestic chips had attained performance comparable to those of Nvidia's models used in China. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, told reporters in London on Wednesday that he expected to discuss the chipmaker's ability to do business in China with Donald Trump that evening during the US president's state visit to the UK. "We can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be," he said. "I'm disappointed with what I see. But they have larger agendas to work out, between China and the US, and I'm understanding of that. We are patient about it." Beijing is putting pressure on Chinese tech companies to boost the country's homegrown semiconductor industry and break their reliance on Nvidia so it can compete in an AI race against the US.

China tells its tech companies they can't buy AI chips from Nivida | TechCrunch

Nvidia just got shut out of the Chinese market -- this time by the Chinese government instead of the US. China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has banned domestic tech companies from buying Nvidia AI chips on Wednesday, as first reported by the Financial Times. The agency also told tech companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to stop testing and ordering Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D server, a device designed specifically for the market in China. Beijing had previously discouraged companies from buying these chips in late August, instead promoting alternatives from local manufacturers. This ban will deliver quite a blow to China's tech ecosystem. While companies like Huawei and Alibaba design AI chips locally, Nvidia is by far the global market leader and its chips are considered to be some of the most advanced on the market. When asked for comment, Nvidia provided the following statement from Huang at a press conference on Wednesday. "We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be," Huang said. "I'm disappointed with what I see but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States. And I'm patient about it. We'll continue to be supportive of the Chinese government and Chinese companies as they wish." The Trump administration hit semiconductor companies, including Nvidia, with licensing requirements to sell their AI chips in China in April. Huang said Nvidia was going to endure $8 billion of revenue loss, in the second quarter alone, by not being able to sell its H20 AI chips in China, on the company's first-quarter earnings call. In June, Nvidia said that it wouldn't include China in its future profit and forecast as it was essentially locked out of the market. In July, the Trump administration reversed course and gave semiconductor companies the green light to sell their chips in China again. In August, the White House announced it would grant the licenses needed to sell in China, but with a catch: the U.S. government would get 15% of the revenue from the chips sold. But as of Nvidia's latest earnings, the company had yet to sell any units to Chinese customers under the plan, citing the slow implementation of President Trump's proposal.

Exploring the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia's China-only GPU, which is now banned from sale -- neutered specs cannot compete with grey-market chips

Nvidia's RTX 6000D was never going to be a hero product, but two procurement sources say that demand is tepid and the chip's value proposition is expensive. (Image credit: Nvidia) Nvidia's RTX 6000D was never going to be a hero product. Built specifically for the Chinese market to navigate U.S. export restrictions, it has a constrained design: a GDDR-based Blackwell GPU with no NVLink, targeting AI inference instead of full-scale training. Two procurement sources speaking to the South China Morning Post say that demand is tepid and the chip's value proposition is "expensive for what it does." And that's before you factor in the uncomfortable comparison to Nvidia's own RTX 5090, the flagship gaming GPU that's officially banned from China but widely available through grey-market channels. By some measure, that consumer card not only costs half as much but outperforms the 6000D in the same inference tasks Nvidia designed its export-safe silicon to run. Shortly after this report, it was noted that China has now banned its biggest tech companies from acquiring Nvidia chips, which may be the real reason why 6000D interest was so tepid in the region. But there are still interesting observations to be made about the curious 6000D itself. Nvidia hasn't published formal specifications for the RTX 6000D, but multiple sources indicate it uses Blackwell architecture with conventional GDDR memory, and delivers around 1,398 GB/s of bandwidth -- just under the 1.4 TB/s export limit. There are strong indications that it avoids HBM and high‑bandwidth interconnect packaging, suggesting simpler die structures and likely dependence on PCIe or external NICs, rather than NVLink. In other words, the 6000D is a PCIe workstation card that looks a lot like the RTX 6000 Blackwell or a tweaked 5090, just with a different name and a dramatically higher price tag. But rather than specs, the core issue is what happens when you try to scale it. Without NVLink, the 6000D may rely on PCIe or external NICs like ConnectX to communicate between GPUs. That puts it at an immediate disadvantage in large-model inference workloads. A 70B-parameter model at FP16 can easily require 140 GB or more just for weights. Even INT8 quantization struggles to fit under 50 GB once you add the KV cache, meaning that you'll often need two or more GPUs just to serve a single model replica. At that point, GPU-to-GPU comms becomes the bottleneck. PCIe 4.0 x16 delivers around 64 GB/s of bandwidth. Meanwhile, NVLink 5.0 is closer to 900 GB/s. Nvidia's own documentation recommends keeping tensor parallelism inside the NVLink domain for exactly this reason -- collective operations like all-reduce and activation exchange are latency-sensitive. Try doing that over PCIe or even 800Gbps Ethernet, and step time balloons. Add more 6000Ds to the cluster, and you can imagine how the payoff in throughput starts to collapse. From a buyer's perspective, what's the point of doing that when you can do better with alternative hardware? The RTX 6000D retailed in China for around $7,000 (¥50,000). That's not far off the amount you might expect to pay for a lower-end HBM-based GPU like the H20, not a GDDR card with no NVLink. And unlike the H20, it's not even pretending to be a training-class GPU. Now compare that to what's available unofficially. Grey-market RTX 5090s, which were designed for gamers but blessed with Nvidia's full Blackwell silicon, are trading for as little as $3,500 (¥25,000). Some are even being resold in blower-style enclosures with expanded VRAM of up to 80GB or even 128GB in modded units. Despite being technically banned under U.S. export rules, they're everywhere. And they perform. So, why choose the 6000D when you can get a more powerful grey-market part without any issues? From a throughput-per-yuan perspective, the grey-market 5090 swarm makes the 6000D look like a bad joke. And with better options potentially being just over the horizon, why would Chinese buyers want to spend money on the 6000D at all? A big part of the 6000D's lackluster reception is circumstantial. Chinese buyers were still waiting on shipments of Nvidia's sanctioned H20, an HBM-based Hopper GPU approved for export in July but still stuck in limbo. It's the chip many hyperscalers wanted for high-density inference, but the latest news of China's Nvidia ban calls into question whether those orders will even be fulfilled. At the same time, there was a hope that the B30A -- a more powerful Blackwell part designed for training -- would win approval for sale, too. However, with the new ban on acquiring Nvidia chips, this seems more unlikely than ever. The B30A was reportedly equipped with 144 GB of HBM3E and NVLink support, delivering up to six times the performance of the H20 for only double the price. As evidenced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)'s latest actions, the country is clearly moving beyond reliance on Nvidia chips. There's a deeper shift underway. China is pushing hard for domestic AI hardware adoption, mandating that state-backed clouds procure at least 50% of their AI accelerators from Chinese vendors. Huawei's Ascend, Biren's CloudMatrix, and Cambricon's NPU lines are all on the table. So is CANN: Huawei's CUDA alternative that just went fully open source. This (in theory) allows developers to move workloads away from Nvidia and toward Ascend, but the transition has been rocky. Chinese LLM lab DeepSeek notoriously scrapped plans to train its next model on Ascend NPUs, much to the disdain of the Chinese government, citing unstable performance and poor chip-to-chip communication. For now, that leaves China's major clouds effectively locked into CUDA. But the political and strategic pressure to break free is building. From China's perspective, there are too few advantages to justify doubling down on Nvidia's ecosystem, which would be terminally behind Western counterparts, if export control rules continued.

China Tells Companies to Stop Buying Nvidia's Repurposed AI Chip

China's cyberspace regulator has instructed companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to halt orders for Nvidia Corp.'s RTX Pro 6000D, a semiconductor for workstations that can be repurposed for artificial-intelligence applications. The Cyberspace Administration of China told companies this week to stop testing the chip and cancel existing orders, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the decision isn't public. Several companies had indicated before the directive that they would buy tens of thousands of the semiconductors, which Nvidia designed to avoid triggering US restrictions on sales of advanced AI chips to China, according to an earlier report in the Financial Times.

Beijing demands Chinese tech terminate Nvidia orders

Nvidia has reportedly been cut off from the Chinese market after regulators in Beijing ordered the nation's top tech companies to suspend testing and cancel orders of the GPU giant's accelerators. China's Cyberspace Administration ordered Alibaba, ByteDance, and unnamed others not to order Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D Blackwell GPUs, unnamed sources familiar with the matter told the Financial Times this week. The card, a nerfed version of Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000 GPUs designed to limbo under performance caps on AI accelerator exports to China, has been rumored to be in development for more than a year now. As we've previously written, US export rules mean Nvidia must limit the card to approximately 581 teraFLOPS of FP4 and 1.4TB/s of memory bandwidth. While faster at 4-bit precision, the card's performance will be roughly equivalent with an H20 at high precision with less than half the bandwidth. The lack of high-speed chip-to-chip interconnectivity also limits the unit's usefulness for AI training. Despite the performance limits, the FT reports that Chinese companies were lining up to purchase tens of thousands of the Blackwell-based accelerators and had even begun working with server suppliers to validate them for deployment, presumably for use in inference or model fine-tuning. The ban comes just weeks after Chinese authorities issued letters to top Chinese tech firms discouraging the use of Nvidia's H20 accelerators, particularly for sensitive government workloads. Shipments of Nvidia's H20 and AMD's MI308, cut-down versions of the companies' H200 and MI300X accelerators respectively, were banned by the Trump administration back in April. However, by July both Nvidia and AMD had worked out a deal convincing Trump to allow them to resume shipments in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the revenues. However, as Nvidia CFO Colette Kress noted during Nvidia's second quarter earnings call that Washington had agreed to allow it to resume sales to China, but the chip designer awaits publication of regulations that will allow it to resume sales. The Chinese government's decision to restrict imports of Nvidia hardware reportedly comes in response to a growing number of domestic alternatives, many of which already outperform the H20. Huawei's Ascend 910C and CloudMatrix 384, which we looked at in detail in July, are examples. In a press conference in London on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed his frustration with Chinese regulators. "We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be," he said, according to a statement. "I'm disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States. And I'm patient about it. We'll continue to be supportive of the Chinese government and Chinese companies as they wish." While Nvidia's share price slipped slightly on the news and closed down 2.6 percent, the ban is unlikely to have a material impact on Nvidia's financials moving forward. While optimistic about resuming sales of H20s and bringing its Blackwell architecture to China, the company is counting on sales in the region for its Q3 forecasts. ®

Nvidia CEO Huang caught between US, China's 'larger agendas'

Sept 17 (Reuters) - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday that Washington and Beijing "have larger agendas to work out" as the tech giant navigates the tricky politics of the U.S.-China trade war and tries to satisfy demand from companies worldwide hungry for the company's crucial AI chips. Huang was speaking in London after the Financial Times reported that China's internet regulator has ordered top tech firms to halt purchases of the American company's AI chips and cancel existing orders. China's reported move comes after a Reuters report earlier in September that said major Chinese tech firms want more of Nvidia's crucial artificial intelligence chips despite being discouraged from purchasing them by Beijing's regulators. While many companies have been caught in the middle of the U.S.-China trade war, Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab is unique. It dominates the AI chip space and receives notable attention from both the White House and the administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as the world's two largest economies have been at loggerheads over trade for most of this year. "We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be," Huang said at the press conference in London, in response to a question about China's regulations. "I'm disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I'm patient about it." Shares of the company, valued at more than $4.2 trillion, were down 2.6% on Wednesday. Nvidia has had to scramble to deal with several unexpected developments, most recently Beijing's accusation that the company violated its anti-monopoly law in a preliminary probe into Nvidia's business practices. In mid-August, Trump engineered an unusual deal that granted Nvidia licenses to sell H20 chips to China - despite concerns about national security - in exchange for a 15% cut of those sales, just days after he said he would not make such a deal. LOBBYING EFFORTS "Jensen Huang's diplomatic comment about 'larger agendas' is CEO-speak for 'We're pawns in a digital Cold War,'" said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital Advisors. Successive U.S. administrations have restricted China's access to advanced chips, while Beijing has responded to the curbs by pressing domestic firms to turn away from American suppliers. Amid the tumult, Nvidia has dramatically boosted its lobbying spending in Washington, hiring three new external firms last month with 21 lobbyists, according to U.S. Senate disclosures. It spent nearly $1.9 million on lobbying in the first half of 2025, well above the $640,000 it spent in all of last year. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has directed companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab, to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. The fresh ban is stronger than the earlier guidance from regulators that focused on the H20, the previous version of Nvidia's China-tailored AI chip, the report said. "We'll continue to be supportive of the Chinese government and Chinese companies as they wish," Huang said in London. CHINA SALES PRESSURED The restrictions could further dent Nvidia's business in China, one of the biggest markets for semiconductors, which made up 13% of Nvidia's total sales last year. "In today's global tech scene, multi-nationals like Nvidia are expected to code-switch between Washington's national security doctrines and Beijing's techno-sovereignty demands, all while keeping shareholders happy," Schulman said. Even after Trump's August agreement of a 15% cut, the chipmaker said it has not sent any H20 chips to China and the U.S. has yet to come up with rules on how to get the payment. Meanwhile, Nvidia's new RTX6000D chip, tailored for the Chinese market, has seen only lukewarm demand, with the chip being seen as not cost-effective and some major tech firms opting not to place orders, Reuters reported on Tuesday. FT on Wednesday reported that several companies have indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D and also started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers before telling them to stop the work after receiving the CAC order. Alibaba, ByteDance and the CAC did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh in Barcelona and Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington; Writing by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee, David Gaffen and Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

China tells its tech companies to stop buying all of Nvidia's AI chips

China's internet regulator has told the country's biggest technology companies to stop buying all of Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips and terminate their existing orders, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its homegrown semiconductor industry and compete with the US. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) informed companies including ByteDance and Alibaba this week to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia's tailor-made product for the country introduced two months ago, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers before telling them to stop the work after receiving the CAC order, said the people. The ban is stronger than earlier guidance from regulators that focused on the H20, Nvidia's other China-only chip widely used for AI. Beijing is putting pressure on Chinese tech companies to break their reliance on Nvidia in order to achieve an independent semiconductor supply chain so it can compete in an AI race against the US. "The message is now loud and clear," said an executive at one of the tech companies. "Earlier, people had hopes of renewed Nvidia supply if the geopolitical situation improves. Now it's all hands on deck to build the domestic system." Nvidia started producing chips tailored for the Chinese market after the US government of then president Joe Biden banned the company from exporting its most powerful products to China, hoping to rein in Beijing's progress on artificial intelligence. Beijing's regulators have recently summoned domestic chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon, as well as search engine giants Baidu and Alibaba, which make their own semiconductors, to report how their products compare against Nvidia's China chips, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter. They have concluded that China's AI processors have reached a level comparable to or exceeding that of the Nvidia products allowed under export controls, the person added. The Financial Times reported last month that China's chipmakers were seeking to triple the country's total output of AI processors next year. "The top-level consensus now is there's going to be enough domestic supply to meet demand without having to buy Nvidia chips," said an industry insider. Nvidia introduced the RTX Pro 6000D in July during chief executive Jensen Huang's visit to Beijing, when the US company also said Washington was easing its previous ban on the H20 chip. China's regulators, including the CAC, have warned tech companies against buying Nvidia's H20, asking them to justify having purchased them over domestic products, the FT reported last month. The RTX Pro 6000D, which the company has said could be used in automated manufacturing, was the last product Nvidia was allowed to sell in China in significant volumes. Alibaba, ByteDance, the CAC and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Cold shoulder: Why Beijing is freezing Nvidia's access to the Chinese market

The Nvidia logo appears on a smartphone reflecting the flags of China and the U.S. Beijing has reportedly halted purchases of yet another AI chip from Nvidia, freezing it out of the market completely -- a move industry experts say reflects the country's growing confidence in domestic chip makers and an attempt at gaining trade leverage. It was only a few months ago when Jensen Huang announced, from China, that the U.S. would allow it to resume sales of its made-for-China H20 graphics processing units, reversing a previous halt on their exports. At the time, Huang had also revealed the company's new RTX Pro GPU for the Chinese market, which had been tailored for AI smart factories and logistics. But Nvidia's fortunes flipped in August, when it was reported that regulators in China had begun mandating tech firms to halt purchases of Nvidia's H20s pending a national security review. Now that the mandate has been expanded to Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D chip, rendering the company unable to sell any products to Chinese customers, according to a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday. That comes after Chinese regulators on Monday said that Nvidia had violated the country's anti-monopoly law, as per a preliminary probe, adding they would continue their investigation. While the exact motives of China's actions against Nvidia remain unclear, tech and geopolitical analysts say the developments show China has become more confident in its own ability to make AI chips and is wielding that as a leverage against the U.S.

China bans its biggest tech companies from acquiring Nvidia chips, says report -- Beijing claims its homegrown AI processors now match H20 and RTX Pro 6000D

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country's top internet regulator, has reportedly banned its biggest tech companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, from buying Nvidia's AI chips. According to the Financial Times, the CAC said that these institutions should stop testing the new RTX Pro 6000D and cancel their orders, even though several companies had already indicated their interest in purchasing tens of thousands of these GPUs, which were set to replace the H20 after it was banned (but before it was unbanned again). This goes against the initial reports that reception for the more affordable AI China-specific GPU was lukewarm -- instead, it turns out that the central government was blocking the purchase of these graphics cards. This new ban comes just weeks after companies were directed to stop ordering Nvidia H20 chips, too. Beijing reportedly believes that homegrown AI chip makers, like Huawei and Cambricon, now produce chips that have comparable performance to Nvidia's China-only products. And although Team Green might still have an advantage with its software stack, other Chinese tech giants like Tencent are pushing to build their own infrastructure to replace that. Because of these developments, China's chip makers are ramping production in anticipation of the glut of orders coming from companies that need AI chips but can't purchase Nvidia products. As reported by FT, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, "We can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be," adding, "I'm disappointed with what I see. But they have larger agendas to work out, between China and the US, and I'm understanding of that. We are patient about it." Huang told reporters in London on Wednesday that he hopes to discuss Nvidia's ability to do business in China with President Trump during the latter's state visit to the UK. This news comes soon after the country accused Nvidia of breaking its anti-monopoly law, with the chipmaker facing fines of up to 10% of its China revenue. However, some also believe that Beijing is making these moves to get a more favorable deal from the U.S. in trade negotiations, especially as export approval for its Blackwell-based B30 chips, which perform up to 80% of its latest products, is still up in the air. On the other hand, some Chinese industry leaders believe that this move is part of the central government's effort to break free from American technology and boost its homegrown semiconductor industry. "The message is now loud and clear," one executive told the Financial Times. "Earlier, people had hopes of renewed Nvidia supply if the geopolitical situation improves. Now it's all hands on deck to build the domestic system."

China reportedly bans tech companies from buying NVIDIA's AI chips

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has reportedly banned the country's local tech companies from purchasing NVIDIA's newest AI chip made for the region. According to the Financial Times, the internet regulator told Chinese tech companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to cancel their orders for and to stop testing NVIDIA's RTX Pro 6000D. After receiving the directive from CAC, the companies reportedly told their suppliers to stop all activities related to the GPU. As Reuters notes, the ban is stronger than the "guidance" the regulator issued against the company's older H20 chips for the country. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is disappointed by the ban, the BBC reports. "There are a lot of places we can't go to, and that's fine," he told reporters. He also said he would "support the US" as it resolves its geopolitical issues with China. Chinese companies had previously indicated that they would be ordering and testing tens of thousands of the AI chip based on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture. Reuters recently reported, however, that it has received lukewarm demand and that some tech firms decided not to put in orders for the product altogether. Some of the companies are apparently holding out for NVIDIA's B30A, which is a more powerful model, to be approved for export by US authorities. The Times says Chinese regulators also recently concluded that local-made AI chips are now comparable to or have even exceeded the counterparts NVIDIA is selling in their country. They reportedly gathered domestic chipmakers, including Huawei and Baidu, to ask for a report on how their products compared against NVIDIA's. If you'll recall, the US put an export restriction on NVIDIA's H20 AI chips in April, out of concerns that China could use it to develop AI tech for its military. In July, the US government allowed the company to export the chips again, reportedly after closing a deal that would give it 15 percent of the sales. Huang also introduced the RTX Pro 6000D in Beijing during his visit at the time. It wasn't the comeback NVIDIA was hoping for, however. Chinese regulators issued a guidance, dissuading local companies from purchasing the H20 chips, allegedly because they were insulted by statements made by US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. By the end of August, The Information reported that the company asked its suppliers to halt production related to the H20. This ban comes days after another Chinese regulator accused NVIDIA of violating China's antitrust laws over its acquisition of chipmaker Mellanox. The State Administration for Market Regulation said the company breached both national regulations and the conditions China set when it originally approved the acquisition. Those terms stated that NVIDIA must continue supplying GPUs and other products to the country and adhering to "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory principles"

China tells domestic companies to stop smuggling Nvidia GPUs in the country

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Big if True: In theory, Chinese IT companies are cut off from advanced accelerators needed to run AI workloads in their servers. In practice, many have still managed to secure powerful Western GPUs. That loophole is now closing, as authorities push firms to shift their focus to domestically produced chips instead. Chinese authorities are ordering local IT companies to stop using Nvidia-made accelerators in their AI systems. According to unnamed sources cited by the Financial Times, Beijing's Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) instructed ByteDance, Alibaba, and other major technology firms to halt testing of the RTX Pro 6000D, a China-specific version of Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000 GPU. The sources said Chinese firms were preparing to purchase tens of thousands of these cards. Many organizations had already begun testing the accelerators and working with Nvidia's suppliers to validate server configurations. The CAC directive effectively froze those plans, with companies notifying suppliers that they no longer intend to move forward. Beijing's move amounts to a de facto ban on Nvidia AI accelerators in China, going beyond previous guidance against the H20 chips. Authorities have reportedly been in talks with domestic chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon, as well as with Alibaba, Baidu, and other tech firms, to assess how homegrown AI accelerators stack up against Western products. The CAC order signals that Chinese officials now believe domestic chips are powerful enough to replace Nvidia's AI products. An industry insider told the FT that top-level authorities are convinced China's chip industry can supply sufficient high-performance accelerators to meet local demand, eliminating the need to rely on Nvidia or other foreign suppliers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the Chinese ban on the company's AI chips "disappointing" and said he plans to raise the issue with President Donald Trump soon. Huang acknowledged that Washington and Beijing have a much broader geopolitical agenda to discuss, meaning Nvidia may have to wait patiently for a potential resolution. China's relationship with Nvidia's AI chip business has been fraught. In theory, the country was already restricted from purchasing the company's most powerful accelerators. In practice, a thriving "GPU repair" and gray-market business emerged to circumvent those limits. The new CAC order appears poised to shut down this parallel market as well.

China Agency Orders Firms to Stop Buying Nvidia AI Chip, FT Says

China's internet watchdog has instructed companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and ByteDance Ltd. to terminate orders for Nvidia Corp.'s RTX Pro 6000D, the Financial Times reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The Cyberspace Administration of China told companies this week to stop testing the chip and cancel existing orders, the FT reported. Before that diktat, several companies indicated they would order tens of thousands of the product, which Nvidia introduced to get around restrictions on the shipment of advanced AI chips to China, the FT said.

China Bans Nvidia's AI Chips

After beating a ban on China sales imposed by the Trump administration, the tech giant is now facing a ban on its products by Chinese regulators. Chinese internet regulator Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) ordered top Chinese tech companies like Bytedance and Alibaba to end their testing and orders of Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D chips, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday citing people with knowledge of the matter. Nvidia unveiled the RTX Pro 6000D chip, a lower tech chip designed just to be sold in China under compliance with American export control rules, earlier this year. The chips were initially designed to fill the void left by the then-banned H20 chips, another lower tech China-only chip. The H20s were recently reapproved for sale by the U.S. but orders have not yet begun shipping out. China is also advocating for the U.S. government to approve the sale of higher tech Blackwell chips to China. The move comes as the latest breaking point of a fraying relationship between China and Nvidia. Last month, Chinese authorities started questioning and cautioning industry titans like Tencent over their purchases of Nvidia's H20 chips, according to Reuters. China's AI industry was largely dependent on American chipmaker Nvidia's chips but that might all be changing soon. After Trump's blanket ban earlier this year choked off the Chinese industry from access to Nvidia chips, Chinese chip development has ramped up. China chip stocks have experienced a major boom so big that the Beijing-based company Cambricon had to warn investors recently. “The message is now loud and clear,†an unnamed Chinese tech executive told the FT. “Earlier, people had hopes of renewed Nvidia supply if the geopolitical situation improves. Now it’s all hands on deck to build the domestic system.†Although no chip, Chinese-made or otherwise, has been considered up to par with Nvidia's offerings, the Financial Times article paints a different picture. After talking to top Chinese tech companies Huawei, Cambricon, Alibaba, and Baidu about their chip development, Beijing has concluded that Chinese AI processors are now comparable or even better than the downgraded Nvidia products that are allowed into China, according to the FT, citing a person with knowledge of the matter. The Chinese chip industry is having a good day. Alibaba shares rose after the company secured a prominent Chinese customer, state-owned telecommunications operator China Unicom, for its new AI chips. Baidu's shares in Hong Kong jumped by the most they have in more than three years after analysts voiced confidence in the search engine operator's chip venture.

China tells tech firms to stop buying all of Nvidia's AI chips, FT reports

Sept 17 (Reuters) - China's internet regulator has instructed the nation's biggest technology firms to stop buying all of Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab artificial intelligence chips and terminate their existing orders, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) directed companies including ByteDance and Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab this week to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, the report said, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. Reuters couldn't immediately verify the report. Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh in Barcelona; Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Nvidia's China-exclusive RTX 6000D reportedly gets lukewarm reception in China due to hobbled performance -- could leave Nvidia with huge backlog of unwanted GPUs

Nvidia's RTX6000D, the China-first card initially designed to fill the void left by the banned (and then unbanned) Nvidia H20, has received very little interest in China, according to Reuters, amidst ongoing trade tensions. Estimates by JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley suggest Nvidia may be on track to produce between 1.5 and 2 million of these GPUs before the end of the year, potentially leaving it sitting on a huge stack of unwanted cards. The specific array of graphics cards that Nvidia is allowed to sell to Chinese firms has fluctuated wildly in 2025 as the Trump administration has initiated on-again, off-again tariffs and trade blockages, particularly in relation to high-end technology like GPUs aimed at AI training and inference. To comply with these regulations, Nvidia has churned out Chinese-specific GPUs like the RTX 5090D and H20. The RTX6000D is the latest development in this space, and was reportedly initially designed as a solution to the ban on H20 exports to the country. Although the H20 is now available once again, and Nvidia is talking up its B30A replacement based on the newer Blackwell architecture, the RTX6000D was an additional GPU design that could have found favor among AI firms scrambling for GPU power. But with ongoing trade negotiations and a major drive within China to prioritize domestically produced chips, Nvidia is said to be struggling to find buyers for the new card. The Reuters sources claim the RTX6000D only started shipping this week, but its performance has been rated lower than Nvidia's bog-standard 5090, which isn't available in China. However, it has been readily available on black and grey markets in China for months now, and there are even modded versions doing the rounds with massively expanded memory capacities for even more AI performance. The RTX6000D is based on the Blackwell architecture and has a memory bandwidth just under the 1,400 Gbps threshold placed on GPU exports to China. At a reported price of 50,000 yuan, or around $7,000, though, it's a hard sell when comparably performative cards are available in variously dubious markets for less than half of that. China has also become increasingly hesitant over Nvidia GPU use in recent months. It accused the US of adding tracking hardware to Nvidia GPUs and even summoned major Chinese CEOs to question them over H20 GPU orders. Chinese authorities most recently even accused Nvidia of violating anti-monopoly legislation in a deal it made in 2020. China and the US continue to discuss trade in Madrid this week, with major points of contention being the sale of high-end GPUs. If the US does approve the sale of Nvidia's B30A GPU, one that's several times faster than the H20 and only around twice the price, that could end up as a huge win for Nvidia - even if it might encourage even weaker interest in the RTX6000D.

China's souring on Nvidia. Here's why

China, which used to be one of Nvidia’s largest markets, seems largely conflicted about reaccepting Nvidia's lower-tech H20 chips that Trump administration finally allowed to resume sales of in July. The Chinese tech industry might be excited about the Nvidia chip flow resuming, but the government is allegedly not. Chinese authorities have discouraged local tech companies from purchasing Nvidia chips citing national security concerns, and even questioned industry titans like Tencent over their purchases of Nvidia chips, according to Reuters. In response, tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu have begun using their own chips to train smaller AI models, the Information reported on Thursday, but they will reportedly continue to use some Nvidia chips. “The competition has undeniably arrived,†an Nvidia spokesperson told Gizmodo. “Customers will choose the best technology stack for running the world's most popular commercial applications and open-source models. We'll continue to work to earn the trust and support of mainstream developers everywhere." Chinese development is ramping up. China chip stocks have experienced a major boom so big that the Beijing-based company Cambricon had to warn investors recently. Tech giants like Huawei and Alibaba are leading the push, but smaller companies are also making strides. Shanghai-based tech company MetaX told the Wall Street Journal last month that it's preparing to start mass production of a new chip that has bigger memory than Nvidia’s H20. Still, largely no chip offering so far has been considered completely up to par with Nvidia’s best offerings. Reuters reported last week that top Chinese tech firms like Alibaba and ByteDance are still very keen to get their hands on Nvidia chips. That’s despite the fact that the Nvidia chips that are being sold to China are downgraded versions of existing models, developed to abide by U.S. exports restrictions. Some experts in Washington think any supply of American tech to China has sizable national security risks attached to it. They also claim the chips can assist China in outpacing American AI innovation. The Biden administration was first to enforce export restrictions on Nvidia chips sold to China, in an effort to curb the entry of high-tech chips into China off of those fears. Beijing landed a particularly big blow to domestic AI confidence earlier this year with Deepseek’s R1, an AI model that rivaled the best of American companies offerings using lower cost chips, inadvertently showing Americans that Chinese innovation did not require the top Nvidia chips. That fueled the blanket ban decision which turned out to be less effective than expected when a Financial Times report found that Nvidia’s highest tech chips were being smuggled into China in the absence of the lower tech H20s. The decision was also a big hit to Nvidia: executives shared in a May earnings call that they had to revise revenue expectations down for the quarter by about $8 billion due to the restrictions. After an intense lobbying effort by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Trump reversed his decision in July, allowing H20 chips sales to China. In exchange, Trump demanded that Nvidia, and fellow American chipmaker AMD, both give the U.S. government a 15% cut of all of their chips revenue in China. Just when Nvidia thought all was finally well, Beijing started raising concerns about the new Nvidia chips coming into China having kill switches and backdoors, urging Chinese companies to not use them. Nvidia has denied the claim. The remaining political uncertainty has continued to cast a shadow on Nvidia’s performance in China. The company conceded in its latest earnings call that they were facing disappointing numbers from the region still and were yet to begin H20 shipments. China has a long relationship with Nvidia. The downturn in that relationship began after the first export restrictions went into effect, ramped up after an antitrust probe in December and has developed a life of its own under Trump's trade war. Chinese officials have voiced security concerns related to the latest round of chips set to enter the country, but this attitude change has less to do with Nvidia itself and more about China’s own chip industry. Chinese AI industry is currently dependent on American chipmakers like Nvidia, and that gives Americans an edge. In the absence of Nvidia chips, China will have to develop their own high-tech chips that can rival and even surpass the quality of Nvidia chips. If that happens, the United States can be at jeopardy to lose its hold on the global chips demand, and China is the runner-up. The country is making a big bet on AI, announcing an $8.2 billion AI-investment fund earlier this year, in an effort to spur innovation and reach independence. “It’s unfortunate to see that we in Asia, including China, are emulating the U.S. when it comes to developing algorithms and large models,†Wei Shaojun, an adviser to senior Chinese government officials and a professor at top Beijing university Tsinghua University told a forum in Singapore on Thursday. He warned that staying on this path of dependence could be “lethal†for the region, according to Bloomberg. Along with the chips push, the country has increasingly emphasized global cooperation in AI, and center to that initiative is Beijing’s desire to cement itself at the center of the global AI trade. It seems China is coming to terms with the fact that aspiration won’t be achievable as long as the industry is dependent on the U.S. for chips, especially when Washington has demonstrated that its trade policy decisions are volatile.

Nvidia shares fall on report of growing pushback from China

Why it matters: The world's most valuable company is being shut out of the second-biggest market in AI computing, a result of U.S. export restrictions and a deepening AI race between Beijing and Washington. Driving the news: China regulators have banned the country's biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia's AI chips, including a newer product -- the RTX Pro 6000D -- specifically designed to comply with the U.S.'s latest export controls, the FT reported. Between the lines: Previous pushback from China against Nvidia's other specially designed product for China, the H20, had already prompted the Santa Clara, California-based chip giant to remove any China sales from its third-quarter outlook. * But several companies in China had signaled interest in the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started work around testing and verification, per the FT. That work has now been stopped, people with knowledge of the matter told the publication. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, asked about the report during a media briefing in London, said that he was "disappointed" with the situation, but that the company was being patient amid the larger geopolitical standoff. * "They have larger agendas to work out, you know, between China and the United States," he said, per the AP. * Huang said he would likely speak with President Trump Wednesday night at a state banquet in the U.K., which they're both scheduled to attend. The impact: Huang told investors in August that China could be a $50 billion market for Nvidia this year alone if the company could address it with competitive products. And that figure could grow 50% a year. * "It's fairly important, I think, for the American technology companies to be able to address that market," he said on the earnings call. Zoom out: Beijing's increasing pushback against Nvidia's chips is coinciding with its belief that China's domestic AI processors are now at least on par with the downgraded GPUs Nvidia is allowed to sell in the country, the FT reported.

Exclusive: Nvidia's new RTX6000D chip for China finds little favour with major firms, sources say

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab RTX6000D, its newest artificial intelligence chip tailored for the Chinese market, has seen only lukewarm demand with some major tech firms opting not to place orders, two people with knowledge of procurement discussions said. The RTX6000D, designed mainly for AI inference tasks, is seen as expensive for what it does, the two people said. They added that testing of samples showed its performance lags the RTX5090 - a chip banned by the U.S. for use in China but which is still readily available through grey market channels at less than half the RTX6000D's price of around 50,000 yuan ($7,000). Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab, Tencent (0700.HK), opens new tab and ByteDance, are also waiting for clarity on whether orders for Nvidia's H20 chip will be processed, separate sources said earlier this month. The U.S. firm regained permission to sell the H20 in July but shipments have yet to restart. Additionally, the firms are hoping that Nvidia's B30A - a much more powerful chip than the H20 - will be approved by Washington. The three chips are downgraded versions of models sold outside China, developed to comply with export restrictions put in place by the United States, which wants to rein in Chinese tech progress and retain its lead in AI development. Tepid demand for the RTX6000D contrasts with optimistic projections from sell-side analysts. JPMorgan said in a report last month that it expected some 1.5 million RTX6000Ds to be produced in the second half of this year. Morgan Stanley predicted in July that Nvidia would have 2 million RTX6000Ds in its pipeline. Nvidia began shipping the RTX6000D this week, according to one of the people. The sources were not authorised to speak to media and declined to be identified. An Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement that the "market is competitive - we offer the best products we can." Alibaba did not address a Reuters query seeking comment. Tencent and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment. PATIENTLY WAITING The extent to which China has access to cutting-edge AI chips is one of the biggest flashpoints in U.S.-Sino trade tensions. On one hand, the U.S. has retreated from its previous position of more severe export restrictions. But Beijing has become increasingly keen for Chinese firms to switch to domestic chips even if Nvidia's products are preferred by many companies. On Monday, Beijing accused Nvidia of violating China's anti-monopoly law, casting more uncertainty on its business in the world's second-biggest economy. The move came as delegations from both sides are meeting in Madrid this week to discuss a trade agreement. Chinese authorities have also summoned companies, including Tencent and ByteDance, over their purchases of the H20, asking them to explain their reasons and expressing concerns over information risks, sources have said. Nvidia has said its products do not pose any backdoor risks that would give anyone a remote way to access or control them. The RTX6000D is based on Nvidia's latest Blackwell architecture with conventional GDDR memory and memory bandwidth of 1,398 gigabytes per second, just below the 1.4 terabyte threshold set under restrictions laid out in April. It was developed in part to fill a void left by the H20, which was banned from sale in April before that decision was reversed. The H20, which is priced between $10,000 and $12,000, uses older Hopper architecture but has greater memory bandwidth of 4 terabytes per second. Shipments of the H20 have, however, not started for several reasons, including Nvidia's need to sort out some issues related to a recent deal to give the U.S. government a portion of its China sales. It remains to be seen whether the planned B30A will be approved in Washington. Also based on Blackwell architecture, it is expected to deliver up to six times more performance than the H20 while costing only twice as much, Reuters reported this month. ($1 = 7.1207 yuan) Reporting by Liam Mo and Brenda Goh; Editing by Edwina Gibbs Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * China Brenda Goh Thomson Reuters Brenda Goh is Reuters' Shanghai bureau chief and oversees coverage of corporates in China. Brenda joined Reuters as a trainee in London in 2010 and has reported stories from over a dozen countries.

Nvidia Just Suffered a Huge Blow in China

For years, the Chinese tech industry has been dependent on the US and its allies for the advanced semiconductors -- colloquially known as "chips" -- that undergird the AI industry. As the "AI race" has heated up to a fever pitch, chips have become its chief commodity -- and bottleneck, as companies compete to build out the infrastructure they believe will run a multi-trillion dollar market. At the moment, the undisputed leader in AI chips is Nvidia, which has rocketed it from modestly-sized gaming hardware outfit to the world's most valuable corporation. If AI is a gold rush, Nvidia is selling shovels. China was already on the back foot in the race to acquire Nvidia chips, due to years of efforts by various US presidents to curb the People's Republic's access to the cutting edge tech. Now, the People's Republic is calling the current administration's bluff: earlier today, China's internet authority, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), banned the nation's biggest firms from buying chips from US tech giant Nvidia. Specifically, the Financial Times reports, the CAC is limiting corporations like ByteDance and Alibaba from ordering Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D, a less advanced unit specially designed for the Chinese market to appease president Donald Trump's wishy washy export control rules. Per the FT, the move affects tens of thousands of RTX Pro units, halting collaborate work that several companies had already ordered with Nvidia suppliers. In its place, a homegrown alternative -- the Huawei Ascend 910c -- is likely to become the go-to AI chip for Chinese tech companies. That model began mass production back in April, as Trump waffled on export restrictions of a previous Nvidia chip. Now, one Chinese tech executive told the FT that "the message is now loud and clear." "Earlier, people had hopes of renewed Nvidia supply if the geopolitical situation improves," the source continued. "Now it's all hands on deck to build the domestic system." Exactly what that means for Nvidia isn't yet clear, but it's probably not good. The chipmaker has been sitting pretty as the most valuable company in the world, worth over $4 trillion. Its stocks fell nearly 3 percent on Wednesday after the CAC's decision became public, the latest in a string of setbacks for the company's aspirations in the Chinese market. Beijing had previously discouraged companies from buying Nvidia chips on patriotic grounds, after US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said he hopes to keep China "addicted" to American tech. One thing's for sure: it's a ballsy move for China, which is betting big on AI in a huge national push to inject the tech into everything from manufacturing to meteorology. But it is in character for the country, which has rapidly achieved remarkable economic resilience in markets ranging from agriculture to automobiles to rare earth metals. That gives it room to flex on the world stage. Since Trump's first tranche of tariffs went into effect in February, Beijing has halted the import of US soybeans, choosing to source the agricultural good from farmers in South America instead. In a typical year, Chinese importers purchase over half of all soybeans grown in the US. This year, however, farmers are losing out on billions in sales. At the moment, it's hard to imagine China ever achieving that type of dominance in the winner-takes-all chip sector -- but then again, this is a country that built a city of eighteen million faster than New York City could expand a subway line.

China is banning its tech firms from buying Nvidia's chips

Nvidia stock slipped in pre-market trading Wednesday amid reports that China has told its biggest tech firms not to buy the U.S. company's chips, in a further escalation of the AI race between the two countries. China's internet regulator ordered companies to halt purchases and cancel existing orders of Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D product, the Financial Times reported, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. The RTX Pro 600D is one of two Nvidia chips made solely for the Chinese market, along with the H20 chip. Nvidia's stock price was down 1.6% in premarket trading on Wednesday. Successive American administrations have moved to restrict China's access to the most advanced American-made chips. Still, Nvidia booked roughly $17 billion from the country -- about 13% of its total revenue -- last year. Last month, the company was reported to be working on a new AI chip for China that is more powerful than the H20 chip it currently sells to the nation, thought to be based on Nvidia's Blackwell chip architecture. When asked about the new chip in an August interview, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did not rule out allowing Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang to sell the more powerful product to China. "I've listened to him pitch the president, and the president listens to our great technology companies, and he'll decide how he wants to play," he said. In April, the U.S. Commerce Department stopped Nvidia from selling its H20 chips to China, but it reversed the ban in July. Lutnick said the administration changed course so that China would still be "addicted" to using U.S. technology. However, the reported move by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) to direct companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to stop buying the chips would undermine that. It comes as the world's second-largest economy looks to cut reliance on U.S. technology. Earlier this week, Beijing said Nvidia had broken competition laws with a deal it completed five years ago. China also opened cases against U.S. suppliers over the weekend, including a pricing investigation into some products from chip company Texas Instruments. Separately, President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are scheduled to talk on Friday after the U.S. and China agreed on the outline of a deal that would resolve the dispute over who owns TikTok. Nvidia, ByteDance and Alibaba did not immediately respond to Quartz's requests for comment.

Nvidia shares drop, China tech surges as Beijing tries to push homegrown AI chips | Fortune Asia

The world's most valuable company may now be facing another China headache, just days after Beijing deemed the chipmaker to have violated the country's antitrust legislation. China's top internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has asked the country's leading tech firms, like Bytedance and Baidu, to stop testing Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D, reports the Financial Times citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter. The chipmaker's shares dropped 2.5% in early trading on Wednesday. But as Nvidia's stock dipped, Chinese tech stocks surged, as investors grew more bullish on the country's ability to push the envelope on both AI software and semiconductor manufacturing. The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks major technology companies traded in the Chinese city of Hong Kong, rose by 4.2% on Wednesday, lifting the index to its highest point in four years. The Tech Index is up by 45% so far this year. The RTX Pro 6000D, launched in July, was Nvidia's latest effort to design a chip for the Chinese market that complies with U.S. export controls. Since 2022, Nvidia has been barred from selling its most advanced products to Chinese companies, forcing the chipmaker to design new chips that can legally be sold in the world's second-largest economy. Washington has routinely tightened its controls, forcing Nvidia to design new export control-compliant products. In the meantime, Chinese chip designers like Huawei and Cambricon have started to catch up. Domestic processors, even if they lag behind Nvidia's top-of-the-line products, may now compare favorably to what the U.S.-based chipmaker is allowed to sell in China. Nvidia is aware of the risk. In its recent earnings filing, the company warned that it "may be unable to create a competitive product for China's data center market that receives approval from the [U.S.] government," which would mean getting shut out of China's data center market. The U.S. government may also be realizing that Nvidia has competition. Officials have pointed to the need to keep Chinese companies hooked on U.S. chips as one reason for granting export licenses for the H20, the China-focused chip that Nvidia already had in full production. Last quarter, Nvidia reported $2.8 billion in sales to customers that use China as a billing location, down from $3.7 billion a year ago. That number did not include any H20 sales. Nvidia also dropped China sales from its forward guidance, citing geopolitical uncertainty. Still, CFO Collette Kress suggested that the company could report as much as $5 billion in Chinese sales if it was permitted to sell the H20. Huang has also previously expressed hopes that the company might be able to make a China-focused version of its Blackwell processor. But now, Nvidia's problems are not just with the U.S. government. Beijing is pressuring the company on multiple fronts. Officials have encouraged companies, particularly those that work closely with the government, to stop using Nvidia chips. Also, Beijing has demanded Nvidia executives explain suggestions by U.S. officials that the chipmaker could include location-tracking in its products to combat chip smuggling. (Nvidia routinely denies that it includes such designs in its chips). Over the weekend, Chinese officials announced that Nvidia had violated its antitrust law, by failing to comply with provisions agreed in exchange for approval of the chipmaker's 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-U.S. networking equipment manufacturer. China has used antitrust investigations to express its displeasure with U.S. policy on trade and export controls. On Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he was "patient" about the status of talks between the U.S. and China. "I'm disappointed with what I see. But they have larger agendas to work out, between China and the U.S, and I'm understanding of that," Huang told reporters in London. Still, Huang reiterated that Nvidia will "continue to be supportive of the Chinese government and Chinese companies as they wish." Investors, on the other hand, are much more bullish on Chinese tech stocks. Baidu shares jumped by 15.8% in Hong Kong after several analysts released optimistic reports about the tech company, citing its cloud business, its latest reasoning model, and its reported progress in designing its own AI chips. Alibaba shares also rose by 5.3% in Hong Kong trading on Wednesday, bringing its year-to-date gains to 98.8%. The Chinese e-commerce giant is also benefiting from AI hype, thanks to its open-source Qwen models. Like Baidu, Alibaba is working on its own AI chips. On Tuesday, Chinese state media reported that China Unicom, a telecommunications company, had agreed to use Alibaba's AI chips in one of its data centers. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China's largest semiconductor company and manufacturer of Huawei's Ascend AI chips, rose by 7.1% on Wednesday. Separately on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that SMIC is testing a locally-made deep-ultraviolet lithography machine, used to make advanced chips. As of now, Chinese companies have needed to rely on imported machinery from ASML, yet purchases are increasingly constrained under U.S. export controls.

China accuses Nvidia of anti-monopoly law violations, raising prospect of heavy fines -- company could be fined 10% of revenue from China

This may also be another indirect tactic in the ongoing trade negotiations. China's market regulatory body has accused Nvidia of violating anti-monopoly laws after the conclusion of a preliminary investigation, as per Reuters. Although the specifics of the alleged breach remain murky, the timing of it may suggest it is indirectly related to the ongoing trade talks between the two countries in Spain. With much of those talks relating to China's access to high-end American processors for AI training and inference, some believe China may be leveraging its legal system as a negotiating tool to encourage more favorable terms. China launched the investigation into Nvidia's business practices related to Chinese anti-monopoly laws in December 2024, with authorities claiming it suspected Nvidia of violating the commitments it made when purchasing the Israeli chip designer Mellanox Technologies in 2020. At the time it was seen as a retaliatory action aimed at the U.S. administration's restrictions on Chinese access to high-end GPUs for AI workloads. Since then the Trump administration and Chinese authorities have gone back and forth on whether Nvidia products could be sold to the country, and if so what types, and in what quantities. The uncertainty has lead to the growth of smuggling and black-market operations, and China pushing for more domestic chip production and adoption among its high-tech firms. That included accusing Nvidia of adding tracking hardware to its graphics chips; a practice Nvidia has denied. But now China claims it has fallen afoul of domestic law for which punitive fines can be quite extensive. In theory, it could levy fines of between 1% and 10% of its annual sales from the previous year. It may not come to that, though, if it turns out this is just part of China's negotiating tactic with the U.S. during talks that are taking place in Madrid this week. Alongside a potential sale of social media company, TikTok, to an American firm, China's access to Nvidia's cutting-edge AI hardware is expected to be on the table. This latest news follows the Chinese Minister of Commerce announcing over the weekend that it was initiating an an anti-dumping investigation into analog IC chips imported from America from companies like Texas Instruments and ON Semiconductor. Vice president of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, has also called on China and other Asian countries to halt their use of Nvidia GPUs permanently, and instead to develop new application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) for the task. He claimed that such an over-reliance on America would pose a long-term risk to Chinese AI independence.

What China Banning Nvidia Chips Means for the AI Race - Decrypt

China's decision to ban its tech giants from buying Nvidia chips may be more than just a trade restriction: It could be Beijing's declaration that the country's semiconductor industry has reached a critical inflection point where it no longer needs American AI hardware to compete. Earlier today, the Financial Times reported that China's internet regulator has demanded the country's tech companies stop buying Nvidia AI chips, citing three sources familiar with the matter. The ban would ostensibly appear to be part of the ongoing U.S. and China trade war, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang telling reporters in London today that the two nations "have larger agendas to work out." But, on a practical level, the move would force a fundamental rewiring of AI infrastructure at companies like ByteDance and Alibaba, which must now abandon testing on Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D processors -- a nerfed version of the new RTX 6000 chips available in America and sold everywhere else in the world -- and pivot entirely to domestic alternatives. More significantly, it signals Chinese regulators' conviction that homegrown chips from Huawei, Cambricon, and others have closed the performance gap enough to sustain the country's artificial intelligence ambitions. China's researchers published 23,695 AI-related publications in 2024, topping the combined output of the United States (6,378), the United Kingdom (2,747), and the European Union (10,055). According to the Financial Times, Beijing recently concluded that its AI processors matched or exceeded the capabilities of Nvidia products allowed under U.S. export controls -- an assessment that would have seemed implausible just two years ago. The reported directive arrives as Chinese companies had tens of thousands of Nvidia units on order, forcing an abrupt halt to verification work with suppliers. The RTX Pro 6000D is Nvidia's last significant product permitted in the Chinese market by the Donald Trump administration. For Nvidia, the ban eliminates what remained of a market that once generated up to 17% of total revenue. The company's stock dropped around 4% today, and analysts had previously calculated potential losses of $8 billion to $16 billion annually from trade restrictions in China. The company's China market share for AI data center chips has already plummeted from 90% to 50% as domestic competitors gain traction. "We can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday in London. "I'm disappointed with what I see. But they have larger agendas to work out between China and the US, and I'm understanding of that." The timing reveals Beijing's growing confidence in its semiconductor sector. Chinese chipmakers plan to triple AI processor output next year, with Huawei's Ascend 910 series leading the charge. While individual Chinese chips don't match Nvidia's most advanced offerings, their cost efficiency allows companies to cluster multiple units for comparable performance -- a different architectural approach that sidesteps the need for cutting-edge manufacturing processes China can't yet achieve. "The message is now loud and clear," an executive at one affected tech company told the Financial Times. "Earlier, people had hopes of renewed Nvidia supply if the geopolitical situation improves. Now it's all hands on deck to build the domestic system." The ban accelerates what many viewed as inevitable: a bifurcated global AI ecosystem where Chinese and Western companies develop along separate technological tracks, carrying major costs for both sides. Just for reference, training OpenAI's AI model GPT-3 consumed an estimated 1,287 MWh (megawatt-hours) of electricity, roughly equivalent to the energy consumption of an average American home for 120 years. Estimates by the coding platform Baeldung show that the company's latest model, GPT-5, may have taken 3,500 MWh, "equivalent to the annual energy consumption of around 320 average American homes," the platform argued. Chinese companies using less powerful domestic chips may face higher electricity costs and longer training timelines for large language models. Conversely, western companies lose access not just to China's market but to the massive datasets and real-world AI applications being developed there. The country's AI research community, the world's largest by publication volume, has increasingly focused on efficiency rather than raw computing power -- developing techniques that extract more performance from available hardware rather than requiring the most advanced chips. This is how DeepSeek R1 was born, and this is how a model created with a fraction of the investment costs thrown by western AI behemoths like OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, was able to release and open source a model capable of beating their state-of-the-art products, offered at premium prices. The split also impacts the broader technology stack. AMD's ROCm platform and other alternatives are challenging CUDA's dominance by offering open-source alternatives that work across different hardware architectures. CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model created by Nvidia, allowing software to use the massive processing power of its own GPUs for tasks like artificial intelligence and scientific computing, making these operations much faster and more efficient. It is currently the standard used for AI training, with developers working with this tech by default. China's emphasis on developing CUDA alternatives could accelerate the creation of hardware-agnostic AI frameworks, potentially benefiting the entire industry by breaking Nvidia's software lock-in that has left technically superior hardware like AMD's GPUs underutilized in AI applications. Right now, if your card doesn't run CUDA (meaning, it's not Nvidia) you better go back to gaming and leave AI training to the grown ups -- or know you'll deal with AI at painstakingly slow speeds. The country's massive AI research output has created a foundation for rapid iteration and improvement. Chinese universities like Tsinghua and Peking have emerged as global AI research powerhouses, with Tsinghua ranking eighth globally in AI research output ahead of institutions like Facebook AI Research and Princeton, according to Peking University. "The top-level consensus now is there's going to be enough domestic supply to meet demand without having to buy Nvidia chips," an industry insider told the Financial Times. Nvidia warned analysts to exclude China from financial projections going forward, essentially writing off what had been one of its fastest-growing markets. The company continues exploring options but acknowledges that political dynamics now override commercial considerations. The ban goes beyond earlier regulatory guidance from the government, which simply encouraged companies to move away from Nvidia. Before the ban, Trump agreed to let Nvidia sell its nerfed chips in exchange for 15% of its profits from those sales.

'I'm disappointed with what I see' says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, amid reports that China has banned some of the country's biggest tech companies from buying its AI chips

According to a report from the Financial Times, China's internet regulator has banned some of the country's biggest tech firms from buying Nvidia's AI chips. The ban is said to specifically prevent certain Chinese companies from ordering and testing the RTX Pro 6000D, a product designed specifically for the Chinese market. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) handed out the ban to several companies, including TikTok owner ByteDance and Alibaba earlier this week, according to three of the FT's sources. Speaking to reporters in London on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that he expected to discuss the situation with US president Donald Trump during his state visit to the UK this week. "We can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be," he said. "I'm disappointed with what I see. But they have larger agendas to work out between China and the US, and I'm understanding of that. We are patient about it." The ban looks to be the latest move in a long and sometimes-troubled relationship between Nvidia and China in regards to its AI GPU products, and comes mere weeks after the older H20 models were reportedly paused from production as a result of security concerns from the Chinese authorities. Earlier this month, reports indicated that Chinese tech firms (including ByteDance) were waiting to buy Nvidia's AI chips as export restrictions began to loosen, as a result of Nvidia applying for licenses to sell the powerful AI hardware in China. Nvidia's CFO, Collette Kress, spoke recently on the subject at a Goldman Sachs event, describing the holdup as a "little geopolitical situation that we need to work through between our two governments." Prior to this, it was reported that China had told its data center operators to source more than 50% of their chips from domestic manufacturers. If The Financial Times sources are correct, this ban would represent a significant escalation in China's seemingly anti-US tech position, as the country seeks to distance itself from reliance on AI hardware from US companies. Nvidia has seemed hopeful in recent months that the Chinese market would open up once more, despite a significant series of setbacks. However, this most recent development would indicate that, while the US government is now happy to open up the AI chip floodgates towards Chinese shores, China's administration is less than pleased about the prospect of some of its biggest domestic tech firms relying on US AI hardware. And it must be said that, while Nvidia's hardware is widely regarded to be the most powerful for AI development and training, the release of the DeepSeek suite of models, a powerful open-source alternative to US AI competition, indicates that the country's homegrown-hardware is capable of keeping China in the AI fight without Nvidia's involvement. Whatever the thinking behind this latest move, it seems that Nvidia's recent attempts to sell to the Chinese market have been beset by pitfalls at every step, and that ultimately, China's government has the last word on whether the sales go ahead at all.

Nvidia CEO disappointed over China chip ban report

London (AFP) - Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang on Wednesday said he was disappointed by a report that Beijing has barred major Chinese tech companies from buying his company's world-leading chips, a crucial component in the generative AI revolution. California-based Nvidia's specially designed chips have catapulted the company to become the world's biggest by market capitalisation, with China seen as a crucial market. But geopolitical tensions between the United States and China have seen Nvidia caught up in relations between the superpowers. Washington restricts Nvidia from exporting its most advanced products to China and last month confirmed the company would pay the US government 15 percent of revenue from certain AI chip sales in the country. Beijing has responded by expressing national security concerns about Nvidia chips and urging Chinese businesses to rely on local semiconductor suppliers instead. In the latest development, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday that China's internet regulator has instructed companies including Alibaba and ByteDance to terminate orders for Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D chips, state-of-the-art processors made especially for the country. "We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be," Huang said at a press briefing in London, responding to a question about the FT report. "I'm disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States. And I'm patient about it. We'll continue to be supportive of the Chinese government and Chinese companies as they wish." According to the FT, citing unnamed sources, the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered companies to end all testing and purchase plans for Nvidia's restricted chips. The ban would follow a decision by Chinese regulators on Monday finding that Nvidia had run afoul of the country's antitrust rules. Observers believe that Beijing's moves to wean Chinese tech companies off Nvidia's offerings are part of its effort to accelerate domestic production from companies like Huawei.

China says Nvidia violated antitrust laws as it ratchets up pressure ahead of U.S. trade talks | Fortune

AI chipmaker Nvidia has increasingly found itself caught in a tug of war between Washington and Beijing. And on Monday, China gave a mighty pull -- ruling that Nvidia had violated the country's antitrust laws. China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said, in a preliminary finding, that Nvidia had failed to fully comply with provisions it had imposed on the chipmaker in 2020 when the agency conditionally approved Nvidia's acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-U.S. networking equipment maker. The move is largely seen as a way for Chinese officials to signal their displeasure with Washington's restrictions on the export of cutting edge technology, including Nvidia's top-of-the-line AI chips, to China. The regulator began its antitrust probe of Nvidia's $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox in December, just days after the U.S. unveiled tougher export restrictions on high-bandwidth memory chips, which are important for AI applications, as well as chipmaking equipment. The move is also being viewed by analysts as a way for Beijing to gain additional leverage in trade talks happening this week between U.S. and Chinese diplomats in Madrid. A tariff truce agreed between the two countries in May, and then extended in August, is now set to expire in November. Over the weekend, Beijing also announced an anti-dumping investigation into a different kind of computer chip made by several U.S. companies, including Texas Instruments and Analog Devices -- a decision that was also widely viewed as an attempt to gain leverage in the ongoing tariff negotiations. Following its preliminary finding, SAMR could fine Nvidia an amount equal to between 1% and 5% of its previous year's sales in China. The regulator can also mandate changes to Nvidia's business practices in the country. Both Beijing's and Washington's policies regarding Nvidia have been, at times, schizophrenic. Chinese officials have expressed anger at Washington for restricting the sale of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China as part of a deliberate policy to ensure the U.S. maintains a lead in AI capabilities over its geopolitical rival. They have also claimed offense at comments by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that the U.S. only sells its "fourth-best" chips to China. Yet, at the same time, Beijing has been eager to encourage the development of its own domestic AI chip industry, centered around Huawei, and upstart chipmakers such as Cambricon and Moore Threads. The country recently mandated that all publicly-owned datacenters will be required to source more than 50% of their chips from domestic producers. In addition, Chinese internet giants Baidu and Alibaba, both of which have developed powerful AI models that rival those produced by U.S. companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, have begun using chips that they designed in-house and had produced domestically to train some of their models, according to a story in The Information that cited unnamed sources familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has seemed torn between the idea of preventing China from gaining access to Nvidia's technology and wanting to ensure Chinese companies build their AI models on U.S. chips. Keeping Chinese companies hooked on Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), the specialized chips used to run AI applications, gives the U.S. a strategic stranglehold with which to exercise leverage over China in both trade talks, and maybe, in the future, a potential armed conflict. The Trump administration is also eager to profit from Nvidia's chip sales to China. In an unprecedented move, as a condition of granting Nvidia and its rival AMD export licenses to sell some of their chips to China, the administration mandated that both companies share 15% of sales with the U.S. government. The Biden administration first began to restrict the sale of Nvidia's chips to China in October 2022, blocking sales of its A100 and H100 GPUs. At the time, the H100 was the most powerful GPU for training AI systems that could be bought outright. Then, a year later, it imposed further controls on the sale of Nvidia GPUs that had been modified to comply with the early restrictions. Following this, Nvidia designed a GPU, called the H20, specifically for the Chinese market that complies with U.S. export rules. In April 2025, however, the Trump administration forced Nvidia to seek export licenses even for sales of H20s. In response, Nvidia announced a $5.5 billion charge to earnings to account for the loss of Chinese H20 sales. But in July, the Trump administration reversed course, saying it would grant these export licenses, provided Nvidia share a slice of the revenues with the U.S. government. Still, the seesawing policy swings from both Washington and Beijing, have made life difficult for the San Jose-based chip company. In late August, Nvidia told investors it could not forecast its revenues from China due to the ongoing geopolitical uncertainty. CEO Jensen Huang told analysts that Chinese GPU sales were a "$50 billion opportunity" for the company over the next few years that would be lost if its access to the market continued to be cut off. Nvidia shares fell slightly today on news of the antitrust investigation.

China orders firms to stop buying Nvidia AI chip, FT says

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. China's internet watchdog has instructed companies including Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance to terminate orders for Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D, The Financial Times reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The Cyberspace Administration of China told companies this week to stop testing the chip and cancel existing orders, the FT reported. Before that diktat, several companies indicated they would order tens of thousands of the product, which Nvidia introduced to get around restrictions on the shipment of advanced AI chips to China, the FT said.

China Bans Top Tech Firms from Buying Nvidia Chips, Report Says

Speaking in London, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he is "disappointed" about the reported ban. China has reportedly banned its largest tech firms from buying Nvidia (NVDA) AI chips, adding pressure on the U.S. chipmaker's sales in the country. Shares of Nvidia, which entered Wednesday's session up roughly a third this year, fell about 3% in recent trading following the news. The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country's internet regulator, told firms including TikTok owner ByteDance and e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA) this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D -- the chip Nvidia introduced in July for the Chinese market, according to the Financial Times. Beijing had concluded that homegrown chips are now performing on par with the Nvidia chips allowed in China under export controls, the FT said, citing people familiar with the matter. ByteDance and Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. The FT report said the companies that started testing and verification work on the chip with Nvidia's server suppliers have since told their suppliers to stop the work. The new ban is stronger than prior guidance from regulators that focused on curbing use of the H20, an earlier version of Nvidia's China-tailored AI chip, and comes after China recently accused Nvidia of antitrust violations. Asked at a press conference in London about the reported ban, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he was "disappointed." Huang is among U.S. tech executives accompanying President Donald Trump on a state visit to the U.K. "We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be," Huang said, according to a transcript provided to Investopedia by the company. "I'm disappointed with what I see but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States. And I'm patient about it. We'll continue to be supportive of the Chinese [government] and Chinese companies as they wish." Nvidia faces U.S. export restrictions on sales of its most advanced chips to China and has tailor-made some of its semiconductors for the country's market. In August, Trump ended H20 restrictions his administration had placed earlier earlier in the year in exchange for a 15% share of revenues.

Nvidia CEO Huang caught between US, China's 'larger agendas' - The Economic Times

Nvidia faces mounting pressure as China's regulator orders firms to halt AI chip purchases, escalating US-China trade tensions. CEO Jensen Huang called the dispute part of "larger agendas" between nations. Despite a Trump-brokered H20 chip deal, restrictions threaten Nvidia's 13% China sales share. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday that Washington and Beijing "have larger agendas to work out" as the tech giant navigates the tricky politics of the US-China trade war and tries to satisfy demand from companies worldwide hungry for the company's crucial AI chips. Huang was speaking in London after the Financial Times reported that China's internet regulator has ordered top tech firms to halt purchases of the American company's AI chips and cancel existing orders. China's reported move comes after a Reuters report earlier in September that said major Chinese tech firms want more of Nvidia's crucial artificial intelligence chips despite being discouraged from purchasing them by Beijing's regulators. While many companies have been caught in the middle of the US-China trade war, Nvidia is unique. It dominates the AI chip space and receives notable attention from both the White House and the administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as the world's two largest economies have been at loggerheads over trade for most of this year. "We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be," Huang said at the press conference in London, in response to a question about China's regulations. "I'm disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I'm patient about it." Shares of the world's most valuable company were down nearly 3%. Nvidia has had to scramble to deal with several unexpected developments, most recently Beijing's accusation that the company violated its anti-monopoly law in a preliminary probe into Nvidia's business practices. In mid-August, Trump engineered an unusual deal that granted Nvidia licenses to sell H20 chips to China - despite concerns about national security - in exchange for a 15% cut of those sales, just days after he said he would not make such a deal. Lobbying efforts "Jensen Huang's diplomatic comment about 'larger agendas' is CEO-speak for 'We're pawns in a digital Cold War,'" said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital Advisors. Successive US administrations have restricted China's access to advanced chips, while Beijing has responded to the curbs by pressing domestic firms to turn away from American suppliers. Amid the tumult, Nvidia has dramatically boosted its lobbying spending in Washington, hiring three new external firms last month with 21 lobbyists, according to US Senate disclosures. It spent nearly $1.9 million on lobbying in the first half of 2025, well above the $640,000 it spent in all of last year. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has directed companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. The fresh ban is stronger than the earlier guidance from regulators that focused on the H20, the previous version of Nvidia's China-tailored AI chip, the report said. "We'll continue to be supportive of the Chinese government and Chinese companies as they wish," Huang said in London. CHINA SALES PRESSURED The restrictions could further dent Nvidia's business in China, one of the biggest markets for semiconductors, which made up 13% of Nvidia's total sales last year. "In today's global tech scene, multi-nationals like Nvidia are expected to code-switch between Washington's national security doctrines and Beijing's techno-sovereignty demands, all while keeping shareholders happy," Schulman said. Even after Trump's August agreement of a 15% cut, the chipmaker said it has not sent any H20 chips to China and the US has yet to come up with rules on how to get the payment. Meanwhile, Nvidia's new RTX6000D chip, tailored for the Chinese market, has seen only lukewarm demand, with the chip being seen as not cost-effective and some major tech firms opting not to place orders, Reuters reported on Tuesday. FT on Wednesday reported that several companies have indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D and also started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers before telling them to stop the work after receiving the CAC order. Alibaba, ByteDance and the CAC did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

China tells companies to stop buying Nvidia's repurposed AI chip

China's cyberspace regulator has instructed companies including Alibaba to halt orders for Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D, a semiconductor for workstations that can be repurposed for artificial-intelligence applications. The Cyberspace Administration of China told companies this week to stop testing the chip and cancel existing orders, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the decision isn't public. Several companies had indicated before the directive that they would buy tens of thousands of the semiconductors, which Nvidia designed to avoid triggering U.S. restrictions on sales of advanced AI chips to China, according to an earlier report in the Financial Times. Nvidia shares slid 2.7% in U.S. trading, while the stock of rival Advanced Micro Devices fell nearly 1%.

China Bans Nvidia Chip Purchases For Major Tech Firms, Stock Falls In Wednesday Pre-Market - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

China has banned its leading technology companies from procuring Nvidia Corporation NVDA's artificial intelligence (AI) chips. During Wednesday's pre-market trading session, Nvidia stock fell nearly 1.5%. China Halts Nvidia Chip Use, Boosts Domestic AI Tech The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has instructed major tech firms, including ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA, to halt their testing and orders of Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D, a chip specifically designed for the Chinese market, the Financial Times reported. This directive follows earlier guidance from Chinese regulators, focusing on Nvidia's H20, another China-only chip widely used for AI. The ban comes after Chinese regulators determined that domestic chips have achieved performance levels comparable to those of Nvidia's models used in China. Nvidia did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comment. Check out the current price of NVDA stock here. China is exerting pressure on its tech companies to strengthen the country's domestic semiconductor industry and reduce their dependence on Nvidia to compete in the global AI race, particularly against the U.S. After the ban, companies instructed suppliers to stop chip-related work, advancing efforts for an independent semiconductor supply chain to rival the US in AI. This ban is a part of China's broader strategy to boost its domestic semiconductor industry and reduce its reliance on foreign technology. This move is seen as a response to the American export ban on Nvidia's most powerful products to China, which was implemented during the tenure of former President Joe Biden. See Also: Larry Summers Warns Trump's Push To Scrap Quarterly Earnings Will Affect How Markets Function: 'Students Don't Like Grades...' Nvidia's Deepening Chinese Woes Earlier this month, a top Chinese government adviser warned that Asian nations risk becoming dependent on U.S. GPUs, which power platforms from ChatGPT to DeepSeek. He urged the country to develop domestic chips that enable artificial intelligence. This ban comes amid a deepening crisis for Nvidia in China. The company is facing an antitrust probe from Chinese regulators, who have alleged that Nvidia violated the country's anti-monopoly law. This, coupled with policy changes from Washington, has created significant uncertainty for Nvidia in the Chinese market. Meanwhile, Jack Ma has re-emerged at the center of Alibaba Group as the company intensifies its push into artificial intelligence. This move could potentially strengthen Alibaba's position in the Chinese semiconductor industry, as the company seeks to develop its own AI chips. Benzinga's Edge Rankings place Nvidia in the 87th percentile for momentum and the 98th percentile for growth, reflecting its strong performance in both areas. Check the detailed report here. READ NEXT: Chinese Gangs Use ChatGPT To Defraud US Real Estate Agents In 'Pig-Butchering' Crypto Scams, Call It 'Really Efficient:' Report Image via Shutterstock Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$165.902.27%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum87.64Growth91.84Quality41.85Value74.30Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewNVDANVIDIA Corp$173.27-0.92%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

NVIDIA's CEO Shows Disappointment Toward the State of the Chinese AI Market as Beijing Goes All-In Towards Relying On Domestic Alternatives

NVIDIA's CEO has spoken about the recent situation with the Chinese AI market and expressed disappointment in the nation's decision to move away from Team Green's AI chips. Well, Team Green's situation in China isn't improving at all, considering that with geopolitical conditions, Jensen now faces another problem: the barrier placed by China's regulator. In a report by the FT, it is revealed that China's Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has told domestic firms like Tencent and ByteDance to stop testing NVIDIA's RTX 6000D GPU, and put a halt to the orders placed, which means that China is indeed moving towards a complete ban of Team Green's products. With this move, NVIDIA is barred from selling 'millions' of RTX 6000D, based on the project demand. This move is claimed to be one of the most aggressive ones from China compared to those made in the past, which included curtailing the H20 AI chip shipments by associating them with the potential presence of security backdoors. Interestingly, NVIDIA's CEO has responded to the situation while on a state visit to the UK with the Trump administration, and here's what he had to say: We can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be.I'm disappointed with what I see. But they have larger agendas to work out, between China and the US, and I'm understanding of that. We are patient about it. It seems that China is moving towards an aggressive shift to domestic AI chip solutions, and the move is driven by the advancements made by the likes of Huawei and Cambricon to provide capable in-house AI products. The report also claims that China has concluded that its homegrown AI chips are now sufficient to compete against NVIDIA's products under export controls, which is why the nation feels like halting NVIDIA's AI chip orders will do the job in reducing reliance on the 'Western' tech stack. Despite reaching adequate performance, China does have a huge production bottleneck, mainly due to insufficient capabilities to produce the required essentials for AI chips in large volumes. This isn't just limited to semiconductors, but also HBM as well, which means that the nation's shift to domestic solutions requires a lot more than just reaching the performance of the H20 AI chip. It would be interesting to see how the situation pans out for Team Green and China ahead, now that the resistance from Beijing is a lot higher.

Why Nvidia's Growth Might Ramp Up Next Year | The Motley Fool

Nvidia sees a tremendous opportunity in China, potentially to sell its Blackwell chips there. Chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA 3.91%) has been generating monstrous growth in recent years. Its artificial intelligence (AI) chips have been a necessity for tech companies investing in AI and next-gen technologies. The company's brand has been synonymous with all things AI, given how integral its chips have been in the development of chatbots and other AI-related products and services. But the nagging concern is that the growth will dry up for Nvidia. Competition will intensify, and companies may cut back on spending, especially if the payoff isn't clear from the investments that they're making in AI. And in recent quarters, Nvidia's growth rate has indeed been slowing down. However, I think there's a good chance it may reverse the trend, and that next year, its growth rate may actually accelerate. Recently, trade conditions between China and the U.S. have been improving. And CEO Jensen Huang is hopeful that the company's cutting-edge Blackwell chip could soon be sold there, saying that it is a "real possibility." For now, it's the company's H20 chip, which is based on older technology, that is expected to be available to China, and even that involved negotiations between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump. In exchange for selling the chip to Chinese customers, the tech company has agreed that 15% of those sales will go to the government. Due to the ambiguity and uncertainty around the Chinese market, Nvidia does not include H20 sales as part of its forecast. The company estimates it could sell billions of dollars worth of chips to China, especially if they are its newer Blackwell chips. Huang says China is a top market for AI, calling it a $50 billion opportunity for Nvidia just this year, and he's projecting it to grow by around 50% per year. If Nvidia can access the Chinese market next year and sell its latest chips, the growth it generates from there could more than make up for declining growth in North America and other markets, thus boosting its overall growth rate. In its most recent quarter, which ended on July 27, Nvidia's revenue totaled $46.7 billion, which represented a year-over-year increase of 56%. This was with the company saying it had no sales of its H20 chip to any Chinese-based customers. While its growth rate has been declining of late, that does come with an asterisk. The above chart may indicate a troubling trend, but when you consider that Nvidia has averaged such a ridiculously high rate of growth over the past couple of years, it's inevitable to see a bit of a slowdown; such an impressive performance isn't likely to be sustainable for long. But what's encouraging is that it's still above 50%, and that's without Nvidia being able to access one of the top AI markets in the world, in China. If Nvidia is able to sell its Blackwell chips to China, that could have a tremendous impact on both its top and bottom lines. It may seem tough to make a case that the most valuable company in the world, Nvidia, is still cheap. It has a market cap of more than $4 trillion. But there could be a compelling case to be made for it, given the potential for massive growth opportunities in the Chinese market. Nvidia trades at a price-to-earnings multiple of 48, but if its growth rate accelerates next year and the company is able to maintain high profit margins, that ratio could conceivably come down. And if it does, that could make it a much cheaper buy than it looks to be. Its price-to-earnings-growth (PEG) multiple of 1.25 also suggests that this isn't a terribly expensive stock to own, given the long-term growth prospects it possesses. As long as AI spending remains strong, there could still be much more upside ahead for investors who buy shares of Nvidia today, especially if the company is able to access a hot growth market such as China.

China tells tech firms to stop buying all of Nvidia's AI chips, FT reports - The Economic Times

China's Cyberspace Administration has reportedly ordered major tech companies like ByteDance and Alibaba to halt purchases of Nvidia's AI chips. The directive includes terminating existing orders and testing of the RTX Pro 6000D. This move signals a potential shift in China's approach to acquiring advanced AI technology from U.S. firms.China's internet regulator has instructed the nation's biggest technology firms to stop buying all of Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips and terminate their existing orders, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) directed companies including ByteDance and Alibaba this week to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, the report said, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.

China gets closer to finding its own Nvidia

A new China-buys-China narrative is taking shape as Beijing steps up its tech rivalry with the U.S. The world's second-largest economy not only wants to build generative AI models, but power them with its own hardware, redrawing a supply chain dominated by Nvidia. There certainly is an opening after Nvidia reportedly halted production related to its H20 AI chip tailor-made for the Chinese market. Beijing had told tech companies to stop buying them due to national security concerns. Last month, DeepSeek released an upgrade to its flagship V3 model to accommodate the next generation of homegrown chips. Nvidia still dominates the supply chain with chips essential for the complicated work of training AI models. But as the industry evolves, a bigger market is in selling chips used for inference, which creates responses from pre-trained models and produces texts as well as images for people who use generative AI tools.

Nvidia's China Chip Boom Faces Threat As Beijing Pushes For Homegrown AI - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Nvidia NVDA has popularized the accelerators that China should ditch, a top government adviser warned, urging the country to develop domestic chips that enable artificial intelligence. Wei Shaojun, a professor at Tsinghua University, a longtime advocate of domestically produced chips, told a forum in Singapore that Asian nations risk becoming dependent on U.S. general-purpose graphics processing units, which now power platforms from ChatGPT to DeepSeek. Wei criticized the region for emulating American approaches to algorithms and large models, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. Also Read: Nvidia Launches New Chip To Boost AI Coding And Video Tools His comments come as Chinese firms struggle under years-long U.S. curbs that restrict access to Nvidia's cutting-edge AI chips, leaving domestic technology several years behind the global frontier. Chinese tech giants are intensifying efforts to win the global AI race, with DeepSeek and Meituan MPNGY emerging as two of the country's strongest contenders against OpenAI, Microsoft MSFT, Alibaba BABA, and Tencent TCEHY. DeepSeek is pushing an agent-focused AI model built to handle multi-step tasks autonomously, retain learning, and minimize user input. Founder Liang Wenfeng aims to launch commercially by year-end, following the R1 model's January debut that rivaled OpenAI at a fraction of the cost. Meituan is betting on open source. The company rolled out LongCat-Flash-Chat, a 560-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model designed for faster, cheaper inference, directly challenging Alibaba Cloud's Qwen ecosystem. Beijing has also pushed local firms to avoid Nvidia's H20 processor -- a downgraded product tailored for the Chinese market under U.S. export rules. Wei urged China to build chips designed explicitly for large-model development rather than continuing to rely on GPU architectures intended initially for gaming and graphics. Nvidia's stock gained over 32% year-to-date, topping the NASDAQ Composite Index's 14% returns. The chip designer continues to generate massive revenue from China as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent hoard its AI chips. Chinese firms ordered as many as one million H20 units -- worth more than $16 billion in a single quarter -- before fresh sanctions, with $17 billion of Nvidia's $18 billion H20 sales since 2025 tied to China. That equals 13% of its fiscal 2024 revenue. To resume H20 shipments, Nvidia agreed to remit 15% of its China chip revenue to the U.S. government. Even so, Bernstein expects its China market share to slip to 55% this year from 66% in 2024. Analysts see more upside ahead. Bank of America's Vivek Arya projects $6-$10 billion in potential China sales through January, though $3 billion-$4 billion could be delayed by supply constraints. CEO Jensen Huang has reassured Chinese buyers, calling China a $50 billion opportunity if Nvidia remains engaged in providing China with sanction-compliant offerings. NVDA Price Action: NVIDIA shares were up 0.46% at $178.14 at the time of publication on Thursday. The stock is approaching its 52-week high of $184.48, according to Benzinga Pro data. Read Next: Super Micro Teams With Nokia To Tackle Surging AI And Cloud Demand Photo: Shutterstock NVDANVIDIA Corp$177.480.08%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum87.58Growth97.83Quality93.46Value4.24Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewBABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$155.347.93%MPNGYMeituan$25.12-1.80%MSFTMicrosoft Corp$502.570.44%TCEHYTencent Holdings Ltd$82.051.79%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

NVIDIA's 'China-Specific' RTX 6000D GPUs Are Being Ignored by Domestic Customers as They Don't Even Keep Up With the GeForce RTX 5090

NVIDIA's RTX 6000D workstation GPU for the Chinese market hasn't solved the firm's position in China at all since firms are reportedly avoiding placing orders. Team Green isn't having a great time in China at all, and their recently introduced RTX 6000D workstation GPU for Chinese customers is reportedly being avoided by major Chinese firms, who cite that the performance isn't worth it. Based on a report by Reuters, it is claimed that the RTX 6000D hasn't seen the reception NVIDIA was hoping for, and the major reason behind it is that China AI firms have access to computing solutions that are far more powerful than the RTX 6000D, whether through grey channels or previous inventory. The RTX 6000D is NVIDIA's first Blackwell-based solution for China, offering GDDR7 memory, TSMC's 4nm process, and a bandwidth of around 1,100GB/s. Based on what we reported previously, NVIDIA was projected to sell two million units of the RTX 6000D GPU, to mitigate for the losses with the H20 AI chip, but the onground situation isn't a favourable one for NVIDIA. Chinese tech giants are hoping that their H20 AI chip orders are processed by Team Green once regulatory approval comes from both sides, and this shows that the RTX 6000D hasn't managed to achieve its objectives. Well, what's next for NVIDIA in China? There are reports that the firm is pushing for selling their B30A AI chips to Chinese customers, which is also a Blackwell GPU featuring TSMC's 4nm node, but with 8-Hi HBM3E and a dual-chiplet configuration, which is claimed to bring a considerable boost in performance relative to the H20. However, the approval for a competitive solution completely depends on how Jensen & Co managed to convince the Trump administration, and by the looks of it, this would be a hefty task. NVIDIA hasn't been in the right conditions for its business in China for several quarters now, mainly driven by geopolitical uncertainties and the firm's forced reduction of AI solutions to comply with US regulations. It will be interesting to see how the situation pans out for Team Green, since securing Beijing is necessary.

NVIDIA Stock Plummets 2% After China Bans AI Chip Purchases: What's Next?

Alibaba, ByteDance Told to Cancel NVIDIA RTX 6000D Orders Amid China Ban NVIDIA stock declined following news that the Cyberspace Administration of China instructed major technology companies to cease purchasing its artificial intelligence chips. As the Financial Times stated, regulators have ordered companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba to cancel the orders of the RTX Pro 6000D and H20 chips. Both models were created with the Chinese market in mind to address the previous US export restrictions. Some companies had already invested heavily in AI and started verifying the suppliers of their servers. This sudden termination changed plans to use products in future AI projects. Additionally, the relocation suggests that Beijing is eager to reduce its dependence on US equipment and expedite the implementation of semiconductors in the country.

Nvidia's new RTX6000D chip for China finds little favor with major firms, sources say

BEIJING/SHANGHAI -- Nvidia's RTX6000D, its newest artificial intelligence chip tailored for the Chinese market, has seen only lukewarm demand with some major tech firms opting not to place orders, two people with knowledge of procurement discussions said. The RTX6000D, designed mainly for AI inference tasks, is seen as expensive for what it does, the two people said. They added that testing of samples showed its performance lags the RTX5090 - a chip banned by the U.S. for use in China but which is still readily available through grey market channels at less than half the RTX6000D's price of around 50,000 yuan (US$7,000). Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, are also waiting for clarity on whether orders for Nvidia's H20 chip will be processed, separate sources said earlier this month. The U.S. firm regained permission to sell the H20 in July but shipments have yet to restart. Additionally, the firms are hoping that Nvidia's B30A - a much more powerful chip than the H20 - will be approved by Washington. The three chips are downgraded versions of models sold outside China, developed to comply with export restrictions put in place by the United States, which wants to rein in Chinese tech progress and retain its lead in AI development. Tepid demand for the RTX6000D contrasts with optimistic projections from sell-side analysts. JPMorgan said in a report last month that it expected some 1.5 million RTX6000Ds to be produced in the second half of this year. Morgan Stanley predicted in July that Nvidia would have 2 million RTX6000Ds in its pipeline. Nvidia began shipping the RTX6000D this week, according to one of the people. The sources were not authorized to speak to media and declined to be identified. An Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement that the "market is competitive - we offer the best products we can." Alibaba did not address a Reuters query seeking comment. Tencent and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment. The extent to which China has access to cutting-edge AI chips is one of the biggest flashpoints in U.S.-Sino trade tensions. On one hand, the U.S. has retreated from its previous position of more severe export restrictions. But Beijing has become increasingly keen for Chinese firms to switch to domestic chips even if Nvidia's products are preferred by many companies. On Monday, Beijing accused Nvidia of violating China's anti-monopoly law, casting more uncertainty on its business in the world's second-biggest economy. The move came as delegations from both sides are meeting in Madrid this week to discuss a trade agreement. Chinese authorities have also summoned companies, including Tencent and ByteDance, over their purchases of the H20, asking them to explain their reasons and expressing concerns over information risks, sources have said. Nvidia has said its products do not pose any backdoor risks that would give anyone a remote way to access or control them. The RTX6000D is based on Nvidia's latest Blackwell architecture with conventional GDDR memory and memory bandwidth of 1,398 gigabytes per second, just below the 1.4 terabyte threshold set under restrictions laid out in April. It was developed in part to fill a void left by the H20, which was banned from sale in April before that decision was reversed. The H20, which is priced between U$10,000 and US$12,000, uses older Hopper architecture but has greater memory bandwidth of 4 terabytes per second. Shipments of the H20 have, however, not started for several reasons, including Nvidia's need to sort out some issues related to a recent deal to give the U.S. government a portion of its China sales. It remains to be seen whether the planned B30A will be approved in Washington. Also based on Blackwell architecture, it is expected to deliver up to six times more performance than the H20 while costing only twice as much, Reuters reported this month. ---

Chinese chip stocks rally as Beijing reportedly restricts Nvidia AI chip purchases By Investing.com

Investing.com-- Chinese semiconductor stocks rallied on Thursday after a Financial Times report stated that the country's cyberspace regulator had instructed major internet companies to stop buying Nvidia's (NASDAQ:NVDA) AI chips and to cancel ongoing orders and tests. The directive, reportedly targeting a China-tailored RTX Pro 6000D model, underscores Beijing's push to cut reliance on U.S. suppliers and accelerate domestic chipmaking capacity. The news comes as Chinese regulators this week also disclosed a preliminary antitrust finding against Nvidia, further clouding its prospects in the world's second-largest economy. Hong Kong-listed shares of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) (HK:0981) jumped more than 5%, while Hua Hong Semiconductor (HK:1347) stock surged 10%. Shenzhen-listed NAURA Technology (SZ:002371), a top supplier of chip manufacturing equipment, climbed 8%, while optical fibre and cable maker Yangtze Optical Fibre (SS:601869) advanced 6%. Shanghai-listed AI hardware supplier Cambricon Technologies (SS:688256) shares gained 3%. Hong Kong-listed Baidu (HK:9888) shares advanced 6% after surging 16% in the previous session, extending their stellar rally amid reports that Baidu has begun using its internally developed Kunlun P800 chip to train its AI models. The surge highlighted investor bets that Beijing's restrictions on foreign chips will funnel more demand to local suppliers. China's drive for technological self-reliance has intensified amid Washington's tightening export curbs. Semiconductors featured prominently in U.S.-China trade talks held in Madrid this week, as both sides grapple with widening tensions over advanced technology. Shares of Nvidia slipped in U.S. trading on Wednesday as the company faces growing regulatory scrutiny and mounting pressure from China's push to develop homegrown AI processors.

China says preliminary probe shows Nvidia violated anti-monopoly law

China's market regulator on Monday said that a preliminary investigation had found that Nvidia had violated the country's anti-monopoly law, marking the latest hit for the U.S. chip giant. The announcement from the State Administration for Market Regulation comes as the U.S. and China hold trade talks in Madrid, where chips, including the ones made by Nvidia, are expected to be on the agenda. The announcement from the SAMR was likely timed to give China clout while trade talks are ongoing, analysts told Reuters. "Both sides appear to be building leverage to negotiate from a more favorable position, but they are doing this through very calculated moves because they understand the stakes at play," said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, managing director at strategic advisory firm GreenPoint. Zhengyuan Bo, partner at research company Plenum, said that SAMR's preliminary ruling was likely part of a counterpunch to the Trump administration's decision on Friday to place 23 Chinese companies on a U.S. trade blacklist. "It's a warning that if the U.S. export control paradigm operates in the same way as in the past several years there will be consequences, and China is willing to inflict damage on U.S. companies," Bo said. The SAMR announcement could also complicate Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's aspirations to overcome U.S.-China tensions to sell modified versions of its advanced chips in the world's second-largest economy. Huang has been on a charm offensive in China this year, visiting the country three times to signal the U.S. company's commitment to the Chinese market, which has in recent years had its access to Nvidia's most cutting-edge chips repeatedly restricted by U.S. export controls. Nvidia's shares fell 2.1% in pre-market trading on Monday. The brief SAMR statement did not elaborate on how the U.S. company, known for its artificial intelligence and gaming chips, might have violated China's anti-monopoly laws. China in December launched an investigation into Nvidia over what it said were suspected violations of the country's anti-monopoly law, a probe that was widely seen as a retaliatory shot against Washington's curbs on the Chinese chip sector. The Chinese regulator also said the U.S. chipmaker was suspected of violating commitments it made during its acquisition of Israeli chip designer Mellanox Technologies, under terms outlined in its 2020 conditional approval of that deal. One of those terms was that Nvidia would continue to supply the Chinese market with GPU accelerators, used in computing. In recent years, the company has been forced to end sales of its most advanced accelerators due to export controls implemented by the administration of former President Joe Biden. The SAMR on Monday added that it would continue its investigations. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to China's antitrust law, companies can face fines of between 1% and 10% of their annual sales from the previous year. China generated $17 billion in revenue for Nvidia in the fiscal year ending January 26, or 13% of total sales, based on its latest annual report. Beyond the fine, the impact of SAMR's decision remains unclear, but Nvidia could going forward be required to sell chips in China that have no Mellanox technology in them, according to Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at consultancy Omdia. But Su added that as long as there is no outright ban of Nvidia GPU sales, demand in China will remain. The extent to which China can have access to cutting-edge AI chips is one of the biggest flashpoints in the U.S.-Sino war for tech supremacy. Nvidia, the world's top maker of AI chips whose fortunes have soared with the AI wave, has been at the center of the fray. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has imposed and then relaxed some of its more severe restrictions on the company's sales of advanced chips to China. At the same time, China is keen for its tech industry to wean itself off U.S. chips. Chinese authorities have summoned companies, including Tencent 0700.HK and ByteDance, over their purchases of Nvidia's H20 chip, asking them to explain their reasons and expressing concerns over information risks, sources said last month Also last month, China's cyberspace regulator summoned Nvidia representatives to explain whether the H20 chip, which Nvidia tailored for China, posed backdoor security risks that could affect Chinese user data and privacy. Plenum's Bo said that the SAMR issuing an unfavorable ruling for Nvidia on its antitrust probe was unlikely to affect Nvidia's bottom line as much as China's efforts to foster domestic substitutes to the U.S. chipmaker's most powerful AI chips. "This should not be taken as a sign that China is trying to kick Nvidia out of the country," he said.

Chinese regulator tells local companies to stop buying Nvidia's AI chips - FT By Investing.com

Investing.com - China's internet regulator has told large tech firms in the country to stop purchasing chips made by semiconductor giant and artificial intelligence-darling Nvidia, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Citing people familiar with the matter, the FT reported that these companies -- including TikTok-owner ByteDance and e-commerce giant Alibaba -- have also been told by the Cyberspace Administration of China to terminate existing orders with Nvidia. The report added that the businesses were also informed that they must end testing and orders of California-based Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D processors, which had been particularly designed for use in China. Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the chips, but told Nvidia's server suppliers to cease testing and verification work following the CAC's demand, the FT said. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the RTX Pro 6000D during a visit to Beijing in July, when U.S. officials were ratcheting down an earlier ban on Nvidia's other China-tailored chip, the H20. Chinese regulators have reportedly also warned tech firms that they will need to justify using the H20 over domestic-manufactured options. The reported ban comes as Beijing has been attempting to bolster domestic chipmakers to help them compete with U.S. rivals in an ongoing race to develop and harness AI models. Chinese regulators have called in local semiconductor players like Huawei and Cambricon to report on how their offerings match up to Nvidia's, the FT said. They now believe that Chinese chip names have products that equal or exceed Nvidia's China-specific options, the paper noted. Shares in Nvidia were slightly lower in premarket U.S. trading on Wednesday. In the previous session, the stock declined on a news report which suggested that demand for the RTX Pro 6000D in China has been weak.

China Bans Tech Companies from Ordering Nvidia's Chips, Sources Tell FT

-- China's internet regulator has banned the country's largest tech companies from buying Nvidia's artificial-intelligence chips, The Financial Times reported, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. The move comes as Beijing ramps up its efforts to boost its domestic industry and compete with the U.S. -- The Cyberspace Administration of China this week told companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba that they are to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia's tailor-made product for the country, the report said. -- Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, told reporters in London on Wednesday that he expected to discuss the company's ability to do business in China with President Trump that evening, during Trump's state visit to the U.K., according to The Financial Times.

Nvidia's China-only AI chip sees weak demand as firms await H20, B30A nod - report By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Nvidia's newest artificial intelligence chip for the Chinese market, the RTX6000D, has drawn only modest interest from buyers since launch, with some major technology firms opting not to order it, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with procurement discussions. The RTX6000D, aimed primarily at AI inference tasks, carries a price tag of around 50,000 yuan ($7,000). But industry players view it as expensive relative to its capabilities, according to Reuters. Testing showed the chip underperforms the RTX5090, a more powerful model that U.S. export restrictions bar from being sold in China. The RTX5090, however, remains widely available on the grey market at less than half the RTX6000D's price, the report added. Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance have also held back from placing orders, Reuters said in a report earlier this month. The companies are awaiting clarity on whether Nvidia's H20 chip -- a downgraded Hopper-based model -- will be shipped following U.S. approval in July. Deliveries have yet to resume. The companies are further pinning hopes on Nvidia's B30A, a Blackwell-based chip expected to deliver up to six times the H20's performance at roughly double the cost, though its approval by Washington remains uncertain. The lukewarm response to the RTX6000D contrasts with upbeat sell-side expectations. JPMorgan estimated last month that about 1.5 million units would be produced in the second half of 2025, while Morgan Stanley forecast Nvidia would have as many as 2 million units in its pipeline. Nvidia only began shipments of the RTX6000D this week, the report said. "The market is competitive - we offer the best products we can," an Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters. The launch comes at a sensitive moment for Nvidia in China. Beijing on Monday accused the company of violating anti-monopoly law, a move that added to uncertainties just as U.S. and Chinese delegations met in Madrid for trade talks. Chinese regulators have also summoned domestic firms, including Tencent and ByteDance, to question their purchases of the H20 and to express concerns over information security, Reuters said. Nvidia has rejected such concerns, stating its products contain no backdoor risks. The RTX6000D is built on Nvidia's new Blackwell architecture, fitted with conventional GDDR memory and bandwidth of 1,398 gigabytes per second -- just below the 1.4 terabyte per second threshold set under U.S. restrictions. It was partly designed to replace the H20, which was banned from sale in April before Washington reversed course. By contrast, the H20 is priced between $10,000 and $12,000 and offers 4 terabytes per second of bandwidth.

China tells tech firms to stop buying Nvidia's AI chips, FT reports

(Reuters) - China's internet regulator has ordered top technology firms to halt purchases of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips and cancel existing orders as part of a broader push to cut reliance on U.S. technology, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Shares of the US company were down 1% in premarket trading. Successive U.S. administrations have restricted China's access to advanced chips, prompting Beijing to press domestic firms to turn away from American suppliers, hitting industry leaders like Nvidia. The move comes days after China accused the company of violating its anti-monopoly law, marking the latest flare-up in the trade war with Washington. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) directed companies including ByteDance and Alibaba this week to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, the report said, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. The fresh ban is stronger than the earlier guidance from regulators that focused on the H20, the previous version of Nvidia's China-tailored AI chip, the report said. Nvidia, Alibaba and Bytedance did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. Nvidia's RTX6000D, its newest artificial intelligence chip tailored for the Chinese market, has seen only lukewarm demand with some major tech firms opting not to place order, Reuters first reported earlier this week. Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers before telling them to stop the work after receiving the CAC order, the FT reported. (Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh in Barcelona;Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee)

Beijing wants to slam the door on Nvidia chips

The British business daily reports in an article published this morning that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) this week asked companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba to halt their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D model, designed specifically for China and launched two months ago. Several groups were planning to order tens of thousands of units and had already begun testing with Nvidia suppliers before receiving the order to stop. This ban goes further than previous recommendations by the authorities, which mainly targeted the H20 chip, another Nvidia model intended for the Chinese market. Beijing is now pushing local companies to completely detach themselves from the American supplier in order to build an independent supply chain. "The message is now crystal clear," sums up one industry executive. "Before, some hoped that Nvidia would resume deliveries if the geopolitical situation improved. Today, everyone is mobilized to build a local system". Nvidia had developed specific versions of its chips after the US banned exports of its most powerful components to China under the Biden administration. Chinese authorities recently summoned national players such as Huawei, Cambricon, Alibaba, and Baidu to compare their chips with Nvidia models authorized under US restrictions, the FT reports. According to one source cited, regulators now believe that Chinese AI processors are reaching - or even exceeding - the level of US chips that are still accessible. China aims to triple its production of AI processors by next year. "The current consensus at the highest level is that there will be enough local supply to meet demand without relying on Nvidia," an industry source says.

Nvidia's new chip for China finds little favour with firms, sources

STORY: Nvidia's RTX6000D chip is its newest artificial intelligence offering tailored for the Chinese market. But according to two people with knowledge of procurement discussions, it's only seeing lukewarm demand. With some major tech firms opting not to place orders. The sources added that the chip is seen as expensive for what it does. And that testing of samples showed its performance lags the RTX5090 - a chip banned by the U.S. for use in China. That chip is still readily available though through grey market channels. Separate sources earlier this month said Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, are also waiting for clarity on whether orders for Nvidia's H20 chip will be processed. The U.S. firm regained permission to sell the H20 in July but shipments have yet to restart. Nvidia began shipping the RTX6000D this week, according to one of the sources. China's access to cutting-edge AI chips is one of the biggest flashpoints in the U.S.-Sino trade tensions. On one hand, the U.S. has retreated from its previous position of more severe export restrictions. But Beijing has become increasingly keen for Chinese firms to switch to domestic chips. On Monday (September 15), Beijing accused Nvidia of violating China's anti-monopoly law, casting more uncertainty on its business in the world's second-biggest economy. The move came as delegations from both sides are meeting in Madrid this week to discuss a trade agreement.