Nvidia tells data centre clients to prioritise non-Chinese customers
The chipmaker has requested that cloud computing partners sell at least 51 per cent of their services to clients outside China.
Nvidia has instructed its data centre partners to ensure the majority of their services are sold to customers outside China, according to a Financial Times report cited by the Times of India.
The company has asked cloud computing clients to direct at least 51 per cent of their services to companies located outside China. These instructions were reportedly delivered verbally by Nvidia's regional and sales teams rather than in writing.
The new rule applies to Nvidia's global clients and covers only future contracts, meaning existing leasing agreements will remain unchanged. This move follows Nvidia halving the number of Asian customers permitted to buy its AI chips this year after implementing a compliance whitelist.
In a statement, Nvidia said that data centres and clouds constructed using American chips provide the foundation for American model and application makers to compete globally. The company added that long-standing US policy supports the development of American infrastructure abroad.
The policy targets overseas leasing deals used by Chinese tech groups to rent computing power for training AI models. One Singapore-based group told the Financial Times that finding sufficient non-Chinese customers outside the US is difficult and that strict enforcement could force some data centres to reduce operations.
Scarcity has impacted pricing, with a rack of B300 chips reportedly fetching nearly five times its international price in China last month. The B300 chip, used by American firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic, cannot be sold in China under US export controls.
