New Delhi, July 14 -- SINGAPORE - Dozens of companies across Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan have been quietly dropped from Nvidia's approved buyer list in recent months, stripped of their eligibility to purchase the company's most advanced chips after failing enhanced compliance checks administered by Nvidia itself. The removals, first reported by the Financial Times, represent the most sweeping contraction yet in the network of authorized Asian resellers that has been under scrutiny from Washington for months.

The whitelist program, which Nvidia introduced under pressure from the US Commerce Department, initially covered hundreds of distributors and value-added resellers across the region. More than half of those entities have now been ...