Alibaba shares fell Thursday as turmoil at Nvidia stoked investor concerns about tighter restrictions on the Chinese tech giant's access to advanced chips.

The stock dropped as much as 7.3% in Hong Kong before closing 6.8% lower at HK$93.80, outpacing the Hang Seng Tech index's 2.4% decline.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia's board is preparing to oust Chief Executive Jensen Huang following an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at data company Megaspeed who is suspected of spying for China.

Alibaba was a key client of Singapore-based Megaspeed, which placed many of the Nvidia servers it acquired in Malaysian data centers and supplied computing power to Alibaba, the WSJ said.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding tighter chip-export restrictions in the wake of the controversy. Advanced Nvidia chips have been critical to Chinese AI developers racing to build frontier models that can compete with Western rivals.

Other Chinese AI stocks also fell in Hong Kong. MiniMax closed 7.8% lower, while Z.AI dropped 9.05%.