Nvidia told cloud customers to keep Chinese buyers under half. It has not confirmed the rule

The Financial Times reported that Nvidia has told its cloud and data-centre customers to make sure they sell at least 51 per cent of their services to companies outside China. Bloomberg and AFP carried the account on 3 November. AFP said the paper cited five people familiar with the matter. The threshold applies to future contracts. Rentals already signed are exempt. No such quota existed before, on the account given to those papers. Nvidia delivered it verbally, through sales staff, rather than in a written policy. A sentence spoken to a customer is not a rule a reader can open.

The point of the threshold, as the Financial Times describes it, is the rental workaround. US export rules have tried to stop advanced graphics processors crossing into China. Chinese firms have still been able to use Nvidia chips that stay in data centres abroad, by buying the computing over a network. Dealroom’s summary of the same report names Singapore and Malaysia among the places. The chips do not move. The customer does. A quota on who the cloud may sell to is aimed at the invoice, not the crate. A Singapore-based provider told the paper that winning enough non-Chinese business, outside the United States, will be hard, and that a strict reading could force it to shrink.

What Nvidia actually said

Nvidia neither confirmed nor denied the 51 per cent figure to AFP. The statement it did give does not mention China, a percentage, or a verbal order. It says datacentres and clouds built on American chips are “the foundation that American model and application makers need to compete worldwide,” and that longstanding US policy “encourages every cloud to build on American infrastructure and to win business everywhere they can.” It adds that America cannot win the AI race unless America’s AI infrastructure wins worldwide, and that if the world’s clouds rely on foreign-made chips, “the model and application layers will be foreign-built as well.” That is an argument for American hardware. It is not an admission of a customer cap.

Beijing’s response was that it had not seen the report. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told AFP she was not aware of it, and that China hopes all parties will provide a fair, transparent and non-discriminatory environment for companies from every country, including Chinese ones. A hope in a briefing is not a counter-order. Until Nvidia puts the 51 per cent in its own writing, or a named cloud shows a contract that was refused, the quota is what five people told a newspaper. The export rule stopped a shipment. This, if it holds, would decide who is allowed to rent what was already shipped.