Nvidia’s banned AI chips double in price on China’s black market, FT reports By Reuters - Investing.com

According to Reuters, the price of NVIDIA's banned AI chips has doubled on China's black market, highlighting the severe challenges facing the global semiconductor supply chain and the profound impact... Read original →

U.S. export controls on high-end AI chips have failed to suppress China’s compute demand; instead, they’ve triggered black-market prices to double, revealing the semiconductor supply chain’s geopolitical fragility. Technically, shortages of chips like the H100 are forcing Chinese cloud providers toward custom architectures and near-memory computing, accelerating RISC-V adoption and chiplet integration. Compliance costs now represent a hidden operational burden: multinationals must develop 'China-specific' SKUs, while domestic firms face secondary supply risks in EDA tools and advanced packaging. AMD’s MI300 series offers limited relief but remains constrained, allowing Huawei’s Ascend to gain ground—though it still struggles with sub-7nm yields. Over the next 18 months, China will prioritize AI accelerators on mature nodes (28nm and above) and deploy 'compute-as-a-service' models to bypass hardware bans. This containment strategy is fundamentally reshaping global semiconductor innovation—from efficiency-driven to security-driven paradigms.