ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) have asked Nvidia Corp about buying its powerful H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips after US President Donald Trump said he would allow it to be exported to China, four people briefed on the matter said.
The Chinese companies are keen to place large orders for Nvidia’s second most powerful AI graphics processing unit (GPU), should Beijing give them the green light, two of the people said.
However, they remain concerned about supply and are seeking clarity from Nvidia, one added.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
Before Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia’s Taiwan-manufactured H200 to be exported to China, the most advanced AI chip that could legally be exported to China was the H20. The H200 is almost six times as powerful as the H20.
The Chinese government has yet to give a clear answer to Trump’s announcement on H200. In the past few months, it has barred government-funded data centers and Chinese tech companies from buying Nvidia’s AI GPUs.
The Information reported yesterday that Chinese regulators gathered representatives from companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) and asked them to assess their demand for the H200.
The officials told the companies they would be informed of Beijing’s decision soon, The Information said, citing sources.
Very limited quantities of H200 are in production, two other people familiar with Nvidia’s supply chain said, as the US chip giant has been focused instead on its most advanced Blackwell and upcoming Rubin lines.
Chinese companies are keen on the H200 as its ability to train AI models is unmatched by domestic equivalents which are more suitable for inference, the sources said.
Elite Chinese universities, data center firms and entities affiliated with China’s military have also sought to procure H200 GPUs through gray-market channels, according to a Reuters review of more than 100 tenders and academic papers.
Before Trump's announcement, anyone supplying Chinese entities with the H200 chip would be in breach of federal law preventing US AI processors past a certain performance threshold from being sent to China.
The policy reversal has created an unusual situation where, in theory, older and less powerful Nvidia AI chips like the A100 and H100, two popular models in China, still fall under US export controls but the H200 does not.
Nevertheless, Chinese companies anticipate authorities might need to review purchase requests and require them to provide use cases, the people said, as they consider the costs and benefits of allowing H200 imports at a time they want to encourage sales of AI chips manufactured in China by the likes of Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Cambricon Technologies Corp (寒武紀).
"The training of leading Chinese AI models still relies on Nvidia cards," said Zhang Yuchun, a general manager at Chinese cloud service provider SuperCloud's solution and ecology units.
"I expect the leading Chinese tech companies to buy a lot although in a low-key manner," he added.
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