China tells its tech companies they can’t buy AI chips from Nvidia (techcrunch.com)

China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has ordered domestic tech firms — including ByteDance and Alibaba — to stop testing and ordering Nvidia AI hardware, specifically targeting the RTX Pro 6000D server that Nvidia had designed for the Chinese market. The directive follows earlier government discouragement in August and arrives amid a fraught backdrop of US export controls and licensing negotiations: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he’s “disappointed” but will comply, and the company has already warned of large revenue impacts (an estimated $8 billion Q2 hit from being unable to sell H20-class chips in China). The ban is significant because Nvidia’s data-center GPUs remain the global performance standard for large-model training and inference; cutting off access accelerates China’s push toward domestic accelerators from Huawei, Alibaba and others, but also risks a temporary capability gap for compute-hungry AI workloads. Practically, Chinese teams may need to retool models for lower-performing or architecturally different chips, fragmenting software stacks and slowing experimentation on large multimodal and foundation models. For Nvidia and the broader market, the move compounds geopolitical supply-chain friction — coming after US licensing twists (including a proposed 15% revenue share for China sales) — and raises the stakes in a race between hardware leadership, software portability, and national industrial policy.