Senate says Nvidia chips are for America first as China tightens import controls (www.theregister.com)

The U.S. Senate slipped the Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence (GAIN AI) Act into the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, effectively creating a mechanism to give U.S. firms priority access to advanced AI chips—an outcome Nvidia publicly warned against—just as China has tightened customs inspections and enforcement to curb imports of Nvidia GPUs. Beijing has also launched an antitrust probe into Nvidia and asked domestic firms to avoid buying U.S. silicon for sensitive workloads, leaving cloud giants like Alibaba and ByteDance scrambling for alternatives. The Senate move and China’s import controls put Nvidia squarely between competing national-security-driven policies on both sides of the Pacific. For the AI/ML community this accelerates supply-chain fragmentation and raises technical and operational risks: firms face constrained access to leading accelerators (e.g., Nvidia H100-class gear), increasing latency and cost for training and inference at scale, and prompting heavier investment in domestic ASICs. China’s push for self-reliance is visible in chips like Huawei’s Ascend 910C, but a reported teardown found components from TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix, underscoring remaining dependence on foreign fabs. Legal uncertainty remains—Congress must still reconcile versions of the NDAA and a government funding stalemate could stall enactment—so companies should plan for both tighter export controls and a more bifurcated global chip ecosystem.