Arnaud Bertrand: Beijing is keeping Nvidia chips out, which cuts against the Alice Huang spy narrative

Commentator Arnaud Bertrand argues the Alice Huang/Nvidia story gets China's incentives backwards: Beijing told Alibaba and ByteDance in 2025 to cancel Nvidia RTX Pro 6000D orders, and Reuters reported on 5 November that about 600,000 Nvidia H200s sit in Hong Kong because Beijing withholds large-scale import approval. Nvidia's own annual report says the Chinese government has discouraged customers from buying its data-centre products. He casts Megaspeed's Southeast Asian rentals to Alibaba as a private workaround to Chinese policy as well as US export controls. US officials, per the NYT, say the MSS wanted to learn about AI chips and influence Nvidia; no evidence has been published and China denies it.