THE CRUNCH
Nvidia has told cloud partners worldwide, through verbal instructions from its sales and regional teams, that at least 51% of their services must go to non-Chinese firms, according to Financial Times reporting. Existing deals and leases are unaffected, but new ones must comply, and Nvidia has neither confirmed nor denied the rule. The move squeezes Chinese AI labs on both of their main routes to Nvidia compute: buying export-compliant cards and renting capacity abroad.
The rental route matters because many Chinese groups have relied on overseas leases for advanced AI work, and they have been the biggest clients for data centres in Southeast Asia. A Singapore-based group told the FT it is "difficult to find enough non-Chinese clients outside the US", and data centres that cannot fill the quota could pull back supply. Tencent has a deal with Oracle to lease 100,000 GPUs in Southeast Asia, while ByteDance, Alibaba and MiniMax pursue similar arrangements, and most of these overseas data centres run chips like the banned B300.
The buying route is equally strained. Chinese customers have ordered more than 6 million of Nvidia's export-compliant RTX Pro 5500 cards, at least twice the roughly 3 million the company could reportedly manufacture in 2027, so partners may only receive 5% to 10% of the original ask. Meanwhile, a B300 rack that sells for about $600,000 internationally reportedly fetched $2.8 million in China last month, and one source told CNBC it was proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese entity would.
The squeeze reflects converging pressures: Nvidia's whitelist more than halved its authorised Asian buyer count, Fleet Intelligence tracking is now required for Southeast Asian providers seeking Nvidia Cloud Partner status, and current US law does not give regulators broad authority over overseas cloud access, though the Remote Access Security Act has passed the House and awaits Senate action. Chinese domestic chips fall short too, with supply of up to 3.5 million units this year against demand exceeding 5 million, partly because buyers prefer Nvidia's CUDA software to Huawei's CANN.