Speaker Johnson says China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban (www.cnbc.com)

China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, reportedly told companies to stop buying Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D — a China-tailored AI GPU — a move that prompted Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to label China an “adversary” and drew public comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who said companies can only serve markets that allow them to. The ban was reported by the Financial Times and comes after a recent U.S. agreement that allowed Nvidia and AMD to obtain export licenses to resume some chip sales to China, with both firms agreeing to remit 15% of those sales to the U.S. government. For the AI/ML community this raises immediate supply and geopolitical risks: access to high-end accelerators in China could be further restricted, driving local workarounds, country-specific chip designs, or black-market demand. It underscores how export controls and national-security licensing (including prior U.S. moves requiring a license for Nvidia’s China-designed H20 processors) are now shaping product roadmaps, commercial terms, and deployment choices for training and inference infrastructure. The incident highlights a growing fragmentation of the global AI hardware market and signals that policy — not just performance or cost — will increasingly determine where and how advanced AI systems are built and scaled.