The Financial Times report, relayed by ComputerBase on 3 November 2026, says the instruction covers new rental contracts for AI computing services. Existing leases are exempt.

The constraint binds the reseller, not the silicon. A cloud provider hosting Grace/Blackwell or Vera/Rubin racks must audit its customer mix before signing a new contract, but the report names no monitoring mechanism, no penalty schedule, and no affected company.

The rule targets a gap in US export controls. Chips cannot ship directly to China, but cloud contracts let Chinese firms rent compute from datacenters abroad. Nvidia's instruction closes that backdoor at the reseller level.

Whether the threshold covers GPU generations older than Grace/Blackwell is unstated. No revenue impact is quantified, and no consequence for missing the 51 percent mark appears in the report.

The draft buried the most newsworthy detail—the absence of any written rule—behind a generic restatement of the 51 percent figure. The rewrite leads with the verbal nature of the instruction, which is what makes this a story rather than a policy memo, and closes on the enforcement gap that keeps it from being a compliance regime.