China bans tech companies from buying Nvidia's AI chips (www.ft.com)

China has ordered domestic tech companies to stop buying high-end Nvidia AI accelerators, effectively cutting off a major market for Nvidia’s H100/H200-class GPUs. The move — framed as a national security and supply-chain self-reliance measure — follows months of U.S. export controls on advanced chips and comes as Beijing ramps up protection of strategic technology. For the global AI market, the ban immediately constrains access to the dominant hardware used for large‑scale model training and inferencing, threatening short‑term project timelines and commercial deployments that depend on Nvidia’s performance and software stack. Technically, the ban forces Chinese firms to accelerate migration to domestic accelerators (Huawei Ascend, Cambricon, Biren and others) and to alternative software ecosystems that lack the same maturity as CUDA, cuDNN and NCCL. Expect disruptions: longer training times or smaller models where domestic silicon lags, increased R&D to close performance gaps, and faster development of toolchains and compatibility layers. The policy also raises geopolitical fragmentation risks — fragmented hardware/software stacks, cloud workarounds, and intensified chip design investments — that could speed independent AI capability development in China while complicating global collaboration and supply chains.