Nvidia halves approved Asian buyers for AI chips amid US export pressure

Nvidia has more than halved the number of customers in Asia cleared to purchase its artificial intelligence chips. The company established a new vetted white list and intensified due diligence in Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan, which have been the primary locations for chip-diversion cases over the past two years.

This commercial tightening follows direct pressure from Washington to close loopholes in the regional distribution network. In May, the US Commerce Department mandated that export licences are required for advanced computing chips destined for any entity ultimately owned by a parent company in China or Macau, regardless of where the subsidiary is located.

The regulatory crackdown arrives after high-profile enforcement actions exposed the scale of grey-market routing. In March, US prosecutors charged a Supermicro co-founder and two employees with allegedly orchestrating a scheme to divert roughly $2.5bn worth of Nvidia hardware into China through a South East Asian proxy.

Massive profit margins have historically fueled these creative logistics. Restricted Nvidia hardware commands a severe scarcity premium inside China, with B300 servers reportedly fetching around $1m, nearly double the standard US list price.

The sudden exclusion of more than half the regional buyer base carries steep economic consequences for South East Asia. Markets like Malaysia have spent three years actively courting data centre investment with promises of cheap land and power, but this compliance burden now risks handing legitimate business to Chinese domestic chipmakers who operate without such overhead.

Legitimate operators in Singapore or Malaysia now face an opaque reapplication process if they are flagged due to complex shareholder structures. Nvidia has not published the criteria for reinstatement, leaving compliant businesses in regulatory limbo.

Beijing has not positioned itself as an aggrieved party in this dynamic. After Washington permitted Nvidia to sell its older H200 chips into China last year, Chinese authorities blocked domestic sales of the hardware to shield their own semiconductor industry, meaning both governments are now restricting the same trade for opposing reasons.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has publicly argued that grey-market data centres are a dead end because they cannot be properly serviced or updated, placing national security first. Meanwhile, Nvidia shares fell approximately 3.5 per cent on Monday, though this tracked a broader technology sell-off rather than reacting specifically to the white list news.

The arrangement leaves a US-listed corporation maintaining a private register of approved Asian buyers for its most valuable products. This effectively outsources US export enforcement to a private vendor that would prefer not to police the market itself.