Nvidia has issued a statement denying that it has cut off graphics card supplies for the Chinese market. In a post on the official Nvidia China Weibo account, the graphics chip maker has characterized talk of cutting supplies to China as "false rumors" and reaffirmed its commitment to provide Chinese customers with its products and services.
Nvidia shared the above post just three hours ago. Google Translate converted the simplified Chinese text as follows:
Regarding the recent false rumors that Nvidia has cut off supply to the Chinese market, we hereby declare:
China is an important market for Nvidia. Nvidia adheres to the original intention of putting customers first and will continue to provide Chinese customers with the highest quality and most efficient products and services.
The rumors were serious enough to prompt the official Nvidia China account to deny them. We haven't found any examples of such rumors on Chinese social media. However, some earlier Chinese tech media reports highlighted unusual happenings at Nvidia China's flagship Tmall store.
According to cnBeta, Nvidia has removed all its products from its Tmall store. Visitors to the store now see a message stating, "No search results. No products matching the keywords were found" (machine translation). According to the Chinese source, there were only links to Nvidia GPU packing desktops and systems from other vendors. At the time of writing, you can see the Nvidia flagship store is still barren in our screenshot below. We didn't input any search terms; this is the flagship store landing page.
From our reading of the comments on Nvidia's Weibo post denying the rumors, it seems like they may have been sparked, at least partly, by GeForce stock being wiped from Tmall.
cnBeta also seems to conflate the Tmall store's emptiness with the ongoing Nvidia antitrust investigations in China. If that were the case, Nvidia should have said so, but it hasn't. While Nvidia products still seem absent from Tmall, there could be several other reasons why the listings are absent now. Chinese netizens seem to have jumped to the worst possible conclusion.
