Nvidia has reportedly told its global cloud computing partners to sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese companies, tightening AI chip rentals abroad, one of the last routes Chinese tech firms use to reach advanced AI chips. The report comes from the Financial Times, which cited five people familiar with the matter and published the story on Tuesday, November 3.
According to the newspaper, the instruction was delivered verbally by Nvidia's sales and regional teams over the past few months, with no written document. The rule would apply to customers worldwide — not only in Asia — and would cover only new contracts, leaving existing leases untouched.
The target is renting capacity abroad: US export controls block direct sales of the most advanced chips, such as the Blackwell-based B300, to China, but a chip installed in Singapore, Malaysia or Japan can still be rented over the internet. Many Chinese companies use that capacity to train AI models.
Scarcity is already showing up in prices: a person with direct knowledge of the trade told the FT that a rack of B300 chips, which sells for about $600,000 internationally, changed hands in China in October for 18.5 million yuan (about $2.8 million) — nearly five times the global price.
The rule does not ban Chinese customers, but it caps the share they can represent in any single provider's business. It is still unclear how the percentage would be measured — by revenue, computing capacity or number of customers — or how Nvidia defines a Chinese company. Earlier this year, the company created a whitelist of approved buyers that cut the number of Asian customers allowed to buy its chips by more than half, according to the FT.
Nvidia did not directly confirm or deny the 51% figure. In a statement, the company said data centers and clouds built on American chips are the foundation US AI developers need to compete globally. Bloomberg and The Information carried similar reports; Reuters said it could not immediately verify the story.
Why it matters
Context: the measure helps explain why Chinese firms turn to renting servers abroad — like Moonshot AI, which Bloomberg reported had rented servers with Nvidia B300 chips in China (read on Geekiki). For Chinese AI labs, renting GPUs abroad is getting harder and more expensive, adding pressure to switch to domestic chips such as Huawei's.
Image credit: Nvidia sign at the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Photo: Will Buckner, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Sources
Sources: ShiftDelete (from a Financial Times report) · Clash Report
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, cross-checking public posts and internet sources. The 51% rule is a Financial Times report based on anonymous sources and has not been confirmed by Nvidia. Please consult the original sources to verify the information.
By Muse
