By claraj@diplomacy.edu
Publication Date: 2026-11-03 09:33:00
American chip company Nvidia reportedly told its cloud computing clients to ensure that 51% of their services are sold to non-Chinese companies.
Semiconductor giant Nvidia has reportedly told its cloud computing clients that they must sell at least 51 percent of their services to non-Chinese companies. According to five people familiar with the matter, the instructions have been communicated verbally and carried out by Nvidia’s sales and regional teams with these new rules being applied to the company’s clients globally.
While Nvidia has neither confirmed nor denied this report, it released a statement explaining that, ‘America cannot win the AI race unless America’s AI infrastructure wins worldwide – if the world’s clouds rely on foreign-made chips, the model and application layers will be foreign-built as well’. This comes after the company more than halved the number of Asian customers allowed to buy its AI chips earlier this year, having imposed stricter compliance checks to prevent its products from reaching China.
Such crackdowns have already fuelled a chip shortage amongst Chinese tech companies and, although the new rules are said to only affect future contracts rather than existing agreements, cloud providers more generally are also expressing difficulties complying with stricter requirements due to the lack of non-Chinese clients outside of the United States. If these providers cannot fill the gap that…
