US Commerce Department moves to block China’s remote access to Nvidia chips

Washington plans to stop Chinese entities from controlling Nvidia hardware located outside China, targeting a loophole that export rules have struggled to close The US Commerce Department plans to block China from remotely controlling Nvidia chips that sit outside Chinese borders. For years, export controls have worked on a simple premise: stop the chip from crossing the border. The problem is that in the age of cloud computing, the chip never has to move. What the Commerce Department is targeting Advanced AI chips work much the same way. A company can rent processing power from a data center in another country and run workloads on it from anywhere, without a single crate of hardware ever touching Chinese soil. That is the gap Washington now wants to close. The plan would extend restrictions beyond physical shipments to cover remote control of Nvidia hardware abroad. The move builds on licensing guidance the department clarified in May 2026. Under that guidance, China-headquartered firms must obtain licenses for GPU chips, including Nvidia’s Blackwell and H200 models, even when those chips are located outside China. The guidance was aimed at loopholes involving overseas subsidiarie...