China plans to allow Alibaba, ByteDance, etc. to import Nvidia H200

"China plans to allow Alibaba, ByteDance, etc. to import Nvidia H200"

It has been revealed that the Chinese government plans to allow major domestic artificial intelligence (AI) companies to purchase Nvidia's AI chip 'H200'.

The U.S. IT media outlet The Information reported on the 8th (local time), citing multiple sources, that Chinese authorities recently informed major technology companies such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Deepseek that they could authorize the purchase of H200 graphics processing unit (GPU) chips.

This comes seven months after then-President Donald Trump informed Chinese President Xi Jinping on December 8 last year that he would allow the export of H200 chips.

To receive approval from the authorities, these companies must submit detailed plans, including how many chips they need specifically and for what purpose they will be used.

However, the total quantity of Nvidia chips approved for purchase is estimated to be less than 200,000 units, which is less than half the quantity requested by companies this year, sources said.

Chinese authorities also restricted that H200 chips must be used for training AI models and should not be used for inference, which is running completed AI models.

For inference, domestic chips should be prioritized.

Furthermore, it was stipulated that H200 chips should only be used for processing public data and cannot be used for sensitive data such as Chinese customer information.

China's policy change, which had previously blocked the import of Nvidia chips to foster and protect its domestic semiconductor manufacturers, is interpreted as a result of the critical shortage of AI computing resources.

As the U.S. recently strengthened its crackdown on Nvidia chip smuggling via Southeast Asia, Chinese companies have also lost access to the black market supply, which was a channel for procuring Nvidia chips.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined the delegation of business leaders accompanying President Donald Trump to the U.S.-China summit in May, raising expectations for Nvidia chip exports to China, but it was reported that this issue was not a major topic at the summit.

After the summit, CEO Huang stated in a media interview regarding H200 exports to China, "I don't have any expectations."

The H200, based on the 'Hopper' architecture, is a GPU released in 2024. It is one generation older than the 'Blackwell' architecture chips currently on the market and two generations older than the 'Rubin' architecture expected to be released in the second half of the year, but it still shows superior performance compared to products from Chinese semiconductor manufacturers.

Meanwhile, it is also reported that Nvidia is pursuing the export of its next-generation central processing unit (CPU) 'Vera' for AI data centers.

On this day, Nvidia's stock price rose by approximately 2.7% compared to the previous day's closing price, hovering around the $202 mark as of 2:30 PM Eastern Time.