Updated:NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, during an interview in Taiwan earlier, stated that they have not yet received any formal orders from Chinese companies, and the final details of the relevant licenses may still be under review and await approval from the Chinese government. Therefore, he believes the reports are not true.
According to current reports, Chinese companies that have purchased NVIDIA H200 AI chips include Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and DeepSeek.
According to ReutersReports allegeAfter a period of stalemate, the Chinese government finally officially approved the import licenses for the first batch of NVIDIA H200 AI chips.
This shift comes after NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made a low-key visit to China last week. Sources revealed that the first batch of approved H200 AI chips numbered in the hundreds of thousands and will be prioritized for supply to three major Chinese internet companies (presumably Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance). This is clearly a timely boon for China's AI industry, which urgently needs high-end computing power.
Once rejected, now the policy has taken a sharp turn.
In fact, the US government had already relaxed restrictions as early as last December, allowing H200 exports to approved Chinese companies. However, at that time, in order to support its domestic semiconductor industry (mainly Huawei), the Chinese government adopted a "cold shoulder" approach, or even refused to comply, not wanting companies to become overly reliant on NVIDIA products.
However, as the arms race in AI model training intensifies, practical pressures are forcing a policy shift. While the H200 is not NVIDIA's most powerful AI chip currently (the Blackwell B200 is currently...),Still subject to strict embargo by the United StatesHowever, its performance far surpasses the "crippled" H20 previously launched specifically for the Chinese market, and it is currently the most powerful computing weapon that Chinese companies can obtain through legal channels.
H200: While not the strongest, it still outperforms domestically produced chips.
Although China is making every effort to promote chip self-sufficiency, and Huawei's current processors are considered the strongest domestic alternatives, semiconductor experts point out that NVIDIA's technology still far surpasses Huawei's or other Chinese manufacturers' current mass production capabilities in terms of hardware and software integration (CUDA ecosystem) and performance.
This explains why, despite the high prices on the black market, over $10 billion worth of NVIDIA high-end chips (including the B200) continued to flow into China through illegal channels. The legal lifting of the H200 ban will alleviate the pressure on some companies to take such risky measures.
Analysis of viewpoints
For NVIDIA, the Chinese market is too large to abandon. Therefore, with the B200 banned from export to China by the US government, promoting the H200 is the best way to maintain revenue and market share.
For the Chinese government, this represents a compromise between "ideals and reality." While the long-term goal is to support Huawei's rise to prominence, in 2026, if Chinese internet companies insist on not using NVIDIA, they will fall further and further behind their American rivals (such as OpenAI and Google) in terms of efficiency in training large-scale language models.
Opening up H200 imports can be seen as a stopgap measure: "using America's second-best weapon to train our own AI army." This also shows that in the AI computing power race, completely "de-Americanizing" remains extremely difficult in the short term. However, with the US continuing its blockade of top-tier chips like the B200, the development of domestically produced chips in China will inevitably continue. The H200 may be NVIDIA's last high-end product that can be shipped in large quantities in the Chinese market.
