China bans its biggest tech companies from acquiring Nvidia chips, says report (www.tomshardware.com)

China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration (CAC), has reportedly ordered major tech firms — including ByteDance and Alibaba — to stop buying Nvidia AI GPUs, telling them to cancel orders for the RTX Pro 6000D and halt testing. The move follows recent directives to pause orders of Nvidia’s H20 accelerators and comes amid Beijing’s view that domestic vendors such as Huawei and Cambricon now offer comparable performance to Nvidia’s China-only chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded that the company can only serve markets that want it, while Beijing has also accused Nvidia of anti‑competitive behavior and could fine it up to 10% of China revenue. For the AI/ML community this is a turning point: it accelerates hardware decoupling and forces large cloud and internet players to pivot to domestic silicon and infrastructure. Short-term effects include increased production and demand for Chinese accelerators and possible GPU shortages or reallocation in global markets; longer-term implications hinge on software ecosystems — Nvidia’s CUDA stack remains an advantage that domestic chips must match. The policy also has geopolitical and commercial dimensions: it may be aimed at strengthening local supply chains, securing leverage in trade talks, or reducing reliance on U.S. tech, while raising questions about model portability, tooling migration costs, and performance parity across competing chip and software stacks.