China has approved the import of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips for ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, enabling the purchase of more than 400,000 units in total.
This decision follows weeks of shipments being held up even after U.S. export clearance on January 13, with Chinese customs signaling earlier that the H200 chips would not be allowed to enter the country.
The H200 is Nvidia’s second-most-powerful AI accelerator after the B200, and it delivers roughly six times the performance of the H20; while Huawei’s offerings now rival the H20’s performance, they still lag behind the H200.
Chinese tech giants say access to the H200 would dramatically speed up training of large AI models and reduce the cost of AI inference, helping them expand data-center services and AI workloads.
Analysts describe the approvals as a balancing act by Beijing—boosting its AI ecosystem while promoting domestic semiconductor capabilities, with licenses sometimes conditioned to favor self-sufficiency; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in China this week, underscoring the high-stakes nature of the AI hardware race.
