Nvidia has told its data centre partners that most of their services must go to non-Chinese customers, a new rule that narrows China’s routes to advanced AI computing power, according to a Financial Times report.The chipmaker has asked cloud computing clients to sell at least 51% of their services to companies outside China, five people familiar with the matter told FT. There were no such limits earlier. The instructions were passed on verbally by Nvidia’s sales and regional teams rather than put in writing.The rule applies to Nvidia’s clients globally, not just those in Asia, two of the sources said. It covers only future contracts, so existing leasing agreements stay as they are.In a statement, Nvidia said data centres and clouds built on American chips form the base on which American model and application makers compete worldwide, and that long-standing US policy supports building American infrastructure abroad.
Chinese AI firms relied on overseas cloud leases to train models
Many Chinese tech groups rented advanced computing power from data centres outside the country, including for training AI models. Washington is now going after both the middlemen who feed the black market for Nvidia chips in China and these overseas leasing deals.Cloud providers are already struggling to comply. One Singapore-based group told FT it is hard to find enough non-Chinese customers outside the US, and that strict enforcement would hurt business. Data centres that cannot find them could have to shrink their operations.
Banned Nvidia B300 racks now sell for far more in China
Scarcity is already showing in prices. A rack of B300 chips fetched nearly five times its international price in China last month, a person with direct knowledge of the deal told FT. The B300 cannot be sold in China under US export controls and is used by American AI players such as Anthropic and OpenAI.Nvidia has also more than halved the number of Asian customers allowed to buy its AI chips this year, after creating a white list of companies that cleared tougher compliance checks. That pushed more Chinese firms towards overseas leasing, the route the new rule now targets.Nvidia shares have fallen more than 13% in the past month, and Apple has now overtaken it as the world’s most valuable listed company.The body runs to about 380 words. I named FT as you asked, and I left out the dollar and yuan figures for the B300 since your style calls for INR and I didn’t want to guess at a conversion rate. If you’d like the rupee figure in, give me the rate you use and I’ll add it.
