Nvidia has officially been locked out of China, this time by Beijing itself, not Washington.
On Wednesday, China’s Cyberspace Administration ordered major tech firms like ByteDance and Alibaba to stop buying, testing, or ordering Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D servers, chips built specifically for the Chinese market.
The move follows months of pressure from Beijing to push companies toward local alternatives made by firms like Huawei and Alibaba Cloud, rather than relying on U.S. hardware.
This is a huge blow: Nvidia dominates the global AI chip scene, with its hardware powering everything from AI model training to cloud data centers. Without it, China’s AI development may slow, at least until local designs catch up.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded diplomatically, saying:
“We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be. I’m disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States.”
The ban is the latest twist in the ongoing U.S.-China chip war:
- Earlier this year, the Trump administration slapped export restrictions and licensing requirements on Nvidia.
- In July, the White House gave chipmakers permission to sell again, but only if the U.S. government gets 15% of the revenue.
- Nvidia, however, admitted it hadn’t sold any units to China under that deal due to the slow rollout.
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Huang had already warned investors that Nvidia could lose $8 billion in a single quarter without access to Chinese buyers. In June, the company even stopped including China in its official sales forecasts, calling the market “effectively closed.”
Now, with Beijing’s latest move, that closure looks permanent.
