Nvidia curbs Asian chip sales as U.S. export controls fuel shift to Chinese AI models

U.S. chip export restrictions and rising costs are driving global companies toward lower-cost Chinese open-source AI models.

• Nvidia has cut over half its authorized Asian AI chip customers after imposing stricter compliance checks to prevent chips from reaching China, the Financial Times reported.
• The U.S. Commerce Department issued guidelines in May limiting advanced chips to Chinese foreign branches, while the Trump administration last month placed export controls on Anthropic’s models.
• Companies including DoorDash, Siemens and Airbnb have adopted Chinese AI models from DeepSeek and Z.ai, attracted by lower costs compared to U.S. alternatives.
• Chinese models accounted for over 30% of weekly token usage on platform OpenRouter since February, reaching 46% in some weeks, up from an 11% average the prior year.

Latest developments

• DoorDash has adopted the Chinese model Kimi for less critical tasks while reserving Claude for complex ones, achieving cost savings.
• Chinese open-weight AI models accounted for 41% of all downloads on Hugging Face, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said.
• Delangue argued that enterprises increasingly prefer open-weight models for cost, accessibility, and ownership advantages, challenging frontier-model dominance.