NVIDIA requires cloud clients to keep 51% of service sales outside China

Overseas clouds have been a workaround for Chinese labs blocked from buying advanced NVIDIA GPUs directly. By requiring that a majority of service revenue come from non-Chinese customers, NVIDIA narrows that channel without an outright ban.

The move lands as DeepSeek plans to train V5 on 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips. Together, the two developments sharpen the decoupling of US and Chinese AI compute. Enforcement is the open question, since cloud resellers can be hard to audit.

Consumers are feeling NVIDIA's pricing power too: RTX 50-series cards face up to $500 price hikes, and local-AI users complain about encrypted RTX Spark firmware slowing Linux inference.