Beijing demands Chinese tech terminate Nvidia orders • The Register
Nvidia has reportedly been cut off from the Chinese market after regulators in Beijing ordered the nation’s top tech companies to suspend testing and cancel orders of the GPU giant’s accelerators.
China’s Cyberspace Administration ordered Alibaba, ByteDance, and unnamed others not to order Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D Blackwell GPUs, unnamed sources familiar with the matter told the Financial Times this week.
The card, a nerfed version of Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 GPUs designed to limbo under performance caps on AI accelerator exports to China, has been rumored to be in development for more than a year now.
As we’ve previously written, US export rules mean Nvidia must limit the card to approximately 581 teraFLOPS of FP4 and 1.4TB/s of memory bandwidth. While faster at 4-bit precision, the card’s performance will be roughly equivalent with an H20 at high precision with less than half the bandwidth. The lack of high-speed chip-to-chip interconnectivity also limits the unit’s usefulness for AI training.
Despite the performance limits, the FT reports that Chinese companies were lining up to purchase tens of thousands of the Blackwell-based accelerators and had even begun working with server suppliers to validate them for deployment, presumably for use in inference or model fine-tuning.
The ban comes just weeks after Chinese authorities issued letters to top Chinese tech firms discouraging the use of Nvidia’s H20 accelerators, particularly for sensitive government workloads.
Shipments of Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308, cut-down versions of the companies’ H200 and MI300X accelerators respectively, were banned by the Trump administration back in April. However, by July both Nvidia and AMD had worked out a deal convincing Trump to allow them to resume shipments in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the revenues.
However, as Nvidia CFO Colette Kress noted during Nvidia’s second quarter earnings call that Washington had agreed to allow it to resume sales to China, but the chip designer awaits publication of regulations that will allow it to resume sales.
The Chinese government’s decision to restrict imports of Nvidia hardware reportedly comes in response to a growing number of domestic alternatives, many of which already outperform the H20. Huawei’s Ascend 910C and CloudMatrix 384, which we looked at in detail in July, are examples.
In a press conference in London on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed his frustration with Chinese regulators.
“We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be,” he said, according to a statement. “I’m disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States. And I’m patient about it. We’ll continue to be supportive of the Chinese government and Chinese companies as they wish.”
While Nvidia’s share price slipped slightly on the news and closed down 2.6 percent, the ban is unlikely to have a material impact on Nvidia’s financials moving forward. While optimistic about resuming sales of H20s and bringing its Blackwell architecture to China, the company is counting on sales in the region for its Q3 forecasts. ®
