China Tells Its Tech Companies To Stop Buying All of Nvidia's AI Chips (ft.com) 52
China's internet regulator has told the country's biggest technology companies to stop buying all of Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips and terminate their existing orders, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its homegrown semiconductor industry and compete with the US. From a report: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) informed companies including ByteDance and Alibaba this week to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia's tailor-made product for the country introduced two months ago, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers before telling them to stop the work after receiving the CAC order, said the people. Nvidia CEO responds: In response to a question on the FT report, Huang said Wednesday that "we can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be."
"We probably contributed more to the China market than most countries have. And I'm disappointed with what I see," Huang said. "But they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I'm understanding of that."
It comes after a tumultuous few years for Nvidia's business in China, which Huang described as "a bit of a rollercoaster."
"We've guided all financial analysts not to include China" in financial forecasts, Huang told reporters Wednesday at a press briefing in London. "The reason for that is because that's largely going to be within the discussions of the United States government and Chinese government."
Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers before telling them to stop the work after receiving the CAC order, said the people. Nvidia CEO responds: In response to a question on the FT report, Huang said Wednesday that "we can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be."
"We probably contributed more to the China market than most countries have. And I'm disappointed with what I see," Huang said. "But they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I'm understanding of that."
It comes after a tumultuous few years for Nvidia's business in China, which Huang described as "a bit of a rollercoaster."
"We've guided all financial analysts not to include China" in financial forecasts, Huang told reporters Wednesday at a press briefing in London. "The reason for that is because that's largely going to be within the discussions of the United States government and Chinese government."
Communist gonna communist (Score:3, Insightful)
When under sanctions, instead of acknowledging reality, the communist party tells the companies to not buy sanctioned goods.
Of course the useful bots parrot such propaganda to the world
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is somehow completely different than the US forcing the regulation and sale of tiktok?
Nvidia hasn't sold a whole lot of chips to China (directly) in the last year anyway and it sounds like the bulk of their product are sold to a couple of cloud whales in the US based on their last quarterly. I interpret this as blowback from the Trump Tariff crap fest and tiktok regulation but maybe its more insidious than that, though I can't imagine its more insidious than our Trade Wars 2025.
Re:Communist gonna communist (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is somehow completely different than the US forcing the regulation and sale of tiktok?
Well, this is direction not to buy certain hardware components in order to favor domestic manufacturers. The Tiktok case was direction to divest a social media supplier to avoid secret, illegal foreign influence campaigns or transfers of personal data.
I'm just an engineer, but the two seem pretty different to me.
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Agreed: The first one is a policy based on real economic reality. The second one is an unsupported conspiracy theory which ignores the reality that US companies that do the exact same thing.
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is that better or worse than an oligarch shill?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Tik/Tok spying is an unsupported conspiracy theory, but that US companies, you can't or won't identify, spying is a 'reality'.
I know I known Trump is involved, so whatever the subjects are and whatever the outcomes are it has to be terrible, but try sounding a little less like Kamala if you want to convince anyone.
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So you rightfully heap some disdain on the utter hypocrisy present in this thread, and then commit your own act of hypocrisy by randomly smearing a private citizen who lost an election 10 months ago after punching down with your "TDS" argument?
Did Kamala come into your house and shit in your Wheaties this morning? What's wrong, don't have a current opponent to demonize so you have to pile onto the irrelevant vanquished opponent still?
Don't be a fucking asshole.
Re:Communist gonna communist (Score:5, Insightful)
If we continue on our current trajectory, we'll end up in a divided world with 2 very different technology stacks. We're already most of the way there anyway. In other news we've always been at war with Eastasia...
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EXACTLY THIS! The US forced Nvidia to offer a modified (compromised?) version of their hardware for the market in China. It's blatantly and plainly a modified version that was modified to ensure the US maintains an edge over them. Why wouldn't they do this? The US already did that, and more, to their products (Huawei, as you mentioned). Who is surprised by this?!?! (besides the orange tariff king, of course)
Re:Communist gonna communist (Score:4, Interesting)
And this is somehow completely different than the US forcing the regulation and sale of tiktok?
Nvidia hasn't sold a whole lot of chips to China (directly) in the last year anyway and it sounds like the bulk of their product are sold to a couple of cloud whales in the US based on their last quarterly. I interpret this as blowback from the Trump Tariff crap fest and tiktok regulation but maybe its more insidious than that, though I can't imagine its more insidious than our Trade Wars 2025.
A more direct comparison would be Nvidia and Huawei. The US has essentially banned Huawei and pushed for the banning of Huawei in many other countries with the claim of national security concerns. That's been true for many years, so the only surprise is that it's taken China this long to ban US companies. China is claiming both national security and discrimination against Chinese companies as reasons. The national security concern is probably less valid, but it's still certainly understandable. The discrimination against Chinese companies is front and center, as both the Biden and Trump administrations have openly pushed to discriminate against Chinese companies.
The only reason China didn't ban Nvidia earlier was that it didn't have an alternative. I'm not sure it now has a viable alternative, but it does have alternatives. Of course, a likely scenario is that China enforces their ban in the same way that the US has been enforcing their own Nvidia to China ban, i.e., by speaking loudly and carrying no stick. China knows that it still needs Nvidia GPUs, but it also knows that it can easily get those GPUs as it has been doing, even as they tout the new ban for propaganda (as the US has also been doing).
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Re:Communist gonna communist (Score:5, Informative)
How's the tariffs going, old chap?
They're doing great. The best you've ever seen. You've never seen tariffs like this [fortune.com]. No one does it better.
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No one does it better.
Don't worry. When the losses become too much, JD Vance will buy the farms from them.
The big question is: Will the brown people be allowed out of the detention camps to resume their jobs and lives? Or, will they become slaves hired-out to corporations owning thousands of acres of crops?
Re:Communist gonna communist (Score:5, Informative)
No, this makes complete economic sense. It boosts their domestic chip design and manufacturing, it cuts out the US of potentially compromised US hardware, and it doesn't come with any really major disadvantages for Chinese AI companies that are already at the head of the pack globally.
Remember that the Chinese AI chips are less efficient and slower than Nvidia ones (for now), but those are things that can be overcome simply by having more of them and extremely cheap energy. China has cheap energy thanks to extremely rapid deployment of renewables and storage, at rates at which Western rivals can only dream of.
The "reality" you think they should acknowledge is that Trump, a racist and a felon who got elected with a campaign of xenophobia and a particular focus on how evil China is, is going to sanction them unless they bend down and lick his boots. Obviously the world's second largest economy is not going to do that, especially when they are winning.
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So when China blocks US products coming in, that's a brilliant move which helps China, hurts the US.
Given that for Nvidia China is a significant if not the largest market for it's AI chips then yes it does hurt the US.
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"oh yeah Orange Man Bad" Yesssss....you finally get it. Just think, if you learn how babies are made, you'll be twice as smart. But don't tell your friends, or they'll be as smart as you then.
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Conflating "you", as in the individual you are replying to, with "you", as in some loud or prevailing opinion out of a loosely defined group, is what leads to your angst.
The guy you replied to likely has a consistent opinion on this. I bet the loud voices that said this was bad for the US to do are also saying its bad for China to do. You're inventing an issue and displaying, once again, how ironic your name is. At least the mods see it for what it is (-1 right now).
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Re:Communist gonna communist (Score:4, Interesting)
All the racist things he says and does.
Actually it's not even worth defending, all that matters is that many people in China think he is a racist and want China to be less reliant on the US as a result. China has been making great progress towards that goal, far better than the US has done in reverse.
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"All the racist things he says and does."
Such as what? Give a specific example.
"many people in China think he is a racist"
Evidence? And hey, lets not worry about the proven genocide that china has carried out against the Uyghurs in the last 2 decades, that doesn't fit the juvenile Da West Is Eeeeevil narrative does it.
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They can both be bad guys, the world doesn't have to always be goodies vs baddies.
Re:Communist gonna communist (Score:4)
Whacking the EPA effort at curtailing pollution in minority areas.
Adding voting restrictions that impact minorities more than white areas.
Invading Northern cities with large minority populations with Confederate armies (Nat. Guard)
Whacking ACA which benefits minorities which are more likely to be lower income.
Causing Red states to redistrict in the middle of the census cycle (gotta steal the next elections) to remove minority representations.
Claiming that Haitian pets are eating Ohio babies (or whatever he was whining about in the last election).
Pop. his alleged administration with white, rich guys rather than having minorities represented.
Discouraging immigration from non-white countries.
Whacking Medicaid which skews towards benefiting minorities.
I can already hear your whining about how this or that policy is not aiming at minorities, but those policies are designed to play the probabilities toward screwing minorities. That's how Maggots like you get to claim he is not a racist. He is, and nothing you bring up will change that.
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So basically he hasn't been despite that load of ChatGPT generated crap you cut and pasted. He may be many things but if he was a racist I very much doubt he'd have appointed a VP with an indian wife. Go ponder on that sonny.
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Yes, but the projections I've seen give them several years before their chips catch up (to TSMC). So the question is "Is this a worthwhile move *this* year?". Clearly they should consider the US an unreliable supplier, however.
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Western projections about China tend to be overly pessimistic.
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"that Trump, a racist"
Your evidence is?
There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to it. You've damn well heard and seen most of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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China has a clear plan and they have been working for decades. Trump's policy choices here are almost irrelevant. I'll even say they have been "impotent".
That has everything to do with China and almost nothing to do with Trump. China has been seeking to import western technology, science, industrialize it more cheaply with lower standards of living and fewer regulatory costs, and then re-invest they spoils of that trade imbalance into their own domestic R&D.
What we are seeing now is phase-2 of plan,
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It's almost certainly "too late", but I wouldn't say that it's "too little", as I don't think it's even the right move. The announced goal, however (move manufacturing back to the US) is correct. OTOH, sabotaging world trade is a really bad move.
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They are probably pushing for higher demand to be created for local tech / chips so that the local stuff can catch up with western tech faster. And presumably exceed western tech after that (EVs and related tech like batteries seem to be something they are leading on now - after many billions and years of pushing them for locals to purchase).
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When under sanctions, instead of acknowledging reality, the communist party tells the companies to not buy sanctioned goods.
you need to keep up.
trump explicitly proposed an exception to sanctions to allow h20 chips to be sold to china a while ago, so he could get a deal with nvidia. nvidia wasn't enthusiastic, and china promptly suggested companies to decline the offer, and has now just reiterated that, all of which strongly suggests that they don't really depend on those chips anymore.
btw, china has no problem with "admitting the reality" of us sanctions. they tend to hurt the us more than them anyway, and when they don't they
China is socially communist ... (Score:2)
... but economically capitalist.
Any country would do the same if they had the ability to do it and China do. Not only will they catch up and surpase Nvidia and PDQ if recent events are anything to go buy , but the money that would otherwise have gone to NVidia will remain in the chinese economy.
Smuggling (Score:2)
Let the smuggling commence! Oh wait it already has.
Not a high profit item for Nvidia anyway (Score:2)
Related (especially the Alibaba story): (Score:2)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/1... [cnbc.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/1... [cnbc.com]
The NVidia thing could be tit-for-tat but also unrelated on the CNBC web site is the absolute FLOOD of new cars that are sitting in empty fields with no buyers, so I could see the thinking not to repeat it with these semis.
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That kind of thing is something that centrally controlled economies are prone to. It's the mirror image is the problems experienced during the "Great Leap Forward". Market driven economies have different problems (monopolies, concentration of power in the hands of the greedy, etc.) . I'm not really sure which is inherently more deleterious. Perhaps it depends on details of implementation.
Weaning China off CUDA (Score:4, Interesting)
It'll take a few years for Chinese GPUs to catch up with NVIDIA. But if Chinese firms are locked into the CUDA stack they'll have to keep buying NVIDIA anyway.
So I suspect the Chinese government is encouraging tech firms to stop using CUDA, so they can switch to Huawei or Cambricon chips at a later date.
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China has no coding language, OS or hardware to run ANY AI.
Everything is in English, something the communist part deeply hates, as it open a Pandora box to listen outside your bubble.
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Note that China doesn't need to build GPUs. It just needs to build AI chips, which is much simpler since you don't need to invest vast numbers of man-years into developing the graphics side.
Build something as fast at AI processing as an x70 Nvidia GPU and put 128GB of RAM on the board and much of Nvidia's market simply disappears.
All of Nvidia's Chips? (Score:2)
Pretty sure China was not buying all of Nvidia's chips. I hardly need to explain why. Nvidia does have other customers here and there.
Attempting to stop China (Score:3)
...from acquiring tech is futile and counterproductive
They have lots of really smart people who are good at overcoming obstacles
They will eventually be world leaders in semiconductor design and manufacturing
Meanwhile, the US continues to cut research funding
Get ready for it (Score:2)
The black market boom. Gamer's Nexus needs to do another documentary soon.
Silicon Curtain replaces Iron Curtain (Score:3)
Hmmm. Back in my cold warrior days, it was the Iron Curtain. This is starting to remind me of that. Back then, Moscow tried to wall off Western goods and information; today, Beijing is walling out Western GPUs — ironically not to restrict information, but to accelerate it on homegrown silicon.
CAC’s ban on Nvidia AI chips forces Alibaba, ByteDance, and others to buy Chinese accelerators (Biren, Moore Threads, Huawei Ascend). The short-term hit is performance; the long-term play is industrial policy — subsidies plus captive demand to build a self-sufficient AI stack. For Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, it’s a hard cutoff: export restrictions from Washington on one side, Chinese bans on the other.
The result is a bifurcated tech world. U.S. + allies double down on Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and hyperscaler silicon (Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium, Microsoft Athena, Meta’s in-house chips). China builds its own ecosystem behind their silicon curtain. Standards and frameworks are going to fracture (Huawei 5G, anybody?) Only this time, the wall isn’t made of barbed wire and checkpoints -- it’s wafers, fabs, and platform lock-in. That means redirection of focus to Europe, India, and the Middle East — where U.S. tech giants are already announcing multi-billion AI buildouts. Huang's direction here is pretty clear -- he all but told Wall Street don’t model China revenue. Given the Chinese market once drove 20–25% of Nvidia's revenue, Wall Street had better pay attention. :)
Domestically, I'm thinking Washington will harden its stance in a couple of ways. Xi basically just told Trump to take his "AI tariff" and shove it -- the 15 percent of H20 China sales Trump extorted from Nvidia just vanished. Xi won that round, bigly. Be interesting, though, to see how the more rational people in this benighted administration respond. I'm thinking more subsidies for TSMC Arizona and Intel Foundry. But I also see even more draconian export policing from the MAGA nutbars. Get out the popcorn; this only going to get stupider with Trump trying to call the shots in a game that he has no clue about.
Great documentary by GN (@GamersNexus) (Score:1)