Beijing blocks RTX Pro 6000
China has told some of its biggest tech outfits, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to stop messing about with Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 chips.
The orders comes from the Cyberspace Administration of China and is yet another shove in Beijing’s effort to ditch US tech dependence.
According to the Financial Times, these companies had already placed sizeable orders and were deep into testing the RTX Pro 6000, a chip custom-built by Nvidia to dodge previous US export bans. Now they’ve reportedly hit the brakes, yanking suppliers off the job and scrapping those orders altogether.
Nvidia’s supreme dalek Jensen Huang said: “I’m disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out,” he said.
Huang added, “Our business in China in the last three years has been a bit of a rollercoaster.”
Beijing has been banging the drum about self-reliance in semiconductors for years, and this latest move is part of the crescendo. It follows a string of US bans, starting when Joe Biden slapped restrictions on Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips. That pushed Nvidia to make the hobbled RTX Pro 6000 specifically for China. Donald Trump’s return to office brought an even tighter clampdown, requiring Nvidia to get licences to flog its H20 chips.
Nvidia’s attempts to play nice have already cost it. The company wrote off $4.5 billion in unsold H20 inventory after that chip was caught in Washington’s security net.
Huang said: “All our guidance assumes no China. That’s largely going to be within the discussions of the United States government and the Chinese government.”
Washington hasn’t stopped with hardware either. It’s told US firms offering chip-design software to cut China off too, as part of the growing tech Cold War.
Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company at more than $4.2 trillion, has ridden the AI boom since ChatGPT went public in 2022. That boom continues, but China is clearly off the map.