Chinese hyperscalers ByteDance and Alibaba are ordering Nvidia H200 chips following export approval, signaling aggressive infrastructure expansion.
ByteDance Ltd and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd have asked Nvidia Corp about purchasing its H200 artificial intelligence chips after US President Donald Trump announced he would permit their export to China, according to four people briefed on the matter. The Chinese companies are keen to place large orders for Nvidia's second most powerful AI graphics processing unit should Beijing approve, though they remain concerned about supply and are seeking clarity from Nvidia. Before Trump's decision, the most advanced AI chip that could legally be exported to China was the H20, which the H200 exceeds in power almost six times over.
The Chinese government has yet to give a clear answer to Trump's announcement, having barred government-funded data centers and Chinese tech companies from buying Nvidia's AI GPUs in recent months. The Information reported that Chinese regulators gathered representatives from Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings Ltd and asked them to assess their H200 demand, with officials telling the companies they would be informed of Beijing's decision soon. Very limited quantities of H200 are currently in production, according to two people familiar with Nvidia's supply chain, as the chip giant has focused instead on its most advanced Blackwell and upcoming Rubin lines.
Chinese companies are keen on the H200 because its ability to train AI models is unmatched by domestic equivalents, which are more suitable for inference. 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 would have breached federal law preventing US AI processors past a certain performance threshold from being sent to China.
The policy shift has created an unusual situation where older, less powerful Nvidia AI chips like the A100 and H100—two popular models in China—still fall under US export controls while the H200 does not. Chinese companies anticipate authorities might need to review purchase requests and require them to provide use cases, as Beijing considers whether to encourage H200 imports at a time it wants to promote AI chips manufactured domestically by companies like Huawei Technologies Co and Cambricon Technologies Corp. "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, adding: "I expect the leading Chinese tech companies to buy a lot although in a low-key manner."