India, Sept. 22 -- China's Internet regulator has ordered technology companies to halt purchases of Nvidia's AI chips and cancel existing orders, the Financial Times reported recently.

The Cyberspace Administration of China directed firms, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to cancel orders for Nvidia's RTX6000D chip, the U.S. company's latest chip for the Chinese market. In recent months, Beijing had begun to pressure tech companies to avoid American chips, with state media raising concerns about backdoors and spyware in Nvidia's products.

Now that pressure seems to have escalated into an outright prohibition, Beijing's motivations remain unclear. The move could be a sign of confidence in China's domestic chipmakers' ability to produce c...