Beijing seeks to remove Nvidia, but Chinese AI developers lack alternatives

China’s government has a plan to cut Nvidia out of its AI ecosystem. The execution is proving considerably harder than the directive. In mid-September 2025, China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) issued guidance barring major technology firms from purchasing Nvidia AI chips, pushing them toward domestic alternatives instead. Companies like ByteDance and Alibaba were told to suspend acquisitions of Nvidia hardware, including the RTX Pro 6000D, as Beijing doubled down on its push for technological self-reliance. A ban that is easier to write than to enforce Huawei’s Ascend chip series represents the most prominent domestic contender, and it has made genuine progress, but engineers and developers working with it consistently describe a product that trails Nvidia’s hardware on raw performance and, more critically, on software maturity. Software ecosystems are the quiet moat around Nvidia’s dominance. CUDA, the programming framework that makes Nvidia GPUs so useful for AI workloads, has been built up over nearly two decades, with thousands of optimized libraries, tools, and developer integrations layered on top. Replacing a chip is hard. Replacing the entire scaffolding of code that ru...