Nvidia is going after the rental route that lets Chinese AI firms use its chips without importing them. Its data center partners must sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese companies.

Nvidia has set the limit itself instead of waiting for the US Commerce Department. Rentals are the gap it is meant to close. Chinese cloud firms have sometimes got round export controls by using restricted chips that foreign companies hold overseas and re-leasing that capacity through their own cloud services. Export-control debates had largely left that channel ambiguous. The 51% rule puts a number on it.

Rented capacity is already at the centre of a US accusation. The White House has accused Moonshot of illegally using banned Nvidia Blackwell chips, saying restricted chips may have been accessed through Thailand. People familiar with the arrangement say Moonshot has a confidential computing agreement with Alibaba for about 20,000 Nvidia chips, which people close to Moonshot say are H200s. Alibaba denied supplying H200-powered compute but did not deny providing 20,000 Nvidia chips of capacity.

Nvidia has also faced questions about diversion. Nvidia and US authorities have reviewed where its GPUs are deployed to check for illegal diversion to China, and on Oct 29 Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, said dealings with Megaspeed International were normal.

Pressure in Washington is rising. Senators Coons, Murray, Reed and Shaheen, all Democrats, have urged Trump to end China's access to advanced chips. Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House China panel, has asked him to tighten limits.

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