How Beijing Rewired the Chip War in One Week
CAC chip bans, T-Head showcases, and Huawei's HBM roadmap signal Beijing's coordinated AI independence push.
Editor’s note: This is Flashpoint, Hello China Tech’s premium quick-strike column. In under 600 words, we cut through the noise to unpack one market-moving China tech event and why it matters. Flashpoint drops whenever the story demands it–weekdays or weekends.
Today’s column decodes how Beijing executed a coordinated three-part strategy in just seven days: banning Nvidia purchases, showcasing domestic chip alternatives, and unveiling Huawei’s ambitious hardware roadmap. This wasn’t coincidence–it was calculated rewiring of the global AI supply chain. For the Flashpoint overview, see our introduction here.
In the space of one week, Beijing sent three shockwaves through the global chip market. Regulators told major internet firms to cancel Nvidia chip orders, state media promoted Alibaba’s T-Head unit as an H20 rival, and Huawei unveiled a roadmap anchored by self-developed high-bandwidth memory (HBM).
Each headline alone would rattle investors; together they sketch a strategy to rewire China’s AI hardware stack.
FT reports that China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has ordered companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to halt purchases of Nvidia accelerators and cancel existing orders. The target is the RTX Pro 6000D in particular.
This marks a strong escalation beyond earlier discouragement of the H20 chip. The performance trade-off is steep.