China lets Nvidia's H200 chips trickle onto the mainland to help its AI firms keep pace with the US
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China is permitting limited imports of Nvidia's H200 chips to help domestic AI companies compete with the US. ByteDance and Tencent have each received roughly 10,000 H200 processors, with other firms potentially following. These chips are at least two generations behind Nvidia's most powerful models, which remain blocked by US export controls. While Washington allows up to 100,000 H200s per company, Beijing prefers to bolster domestic suppliers such as Huawei. Hong Kong can receive shipments but lacks adequate data-center infrastructure and power. All purchases require approval from China's NDRC planning agency. Chinese labs are improving technically with models like Moonshot K3 and DeepSeek V4, but they still trail US rivals in inference capacity. Nvidia reportedly holds around 500,000 H200 units in inventory.
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