China moves to allow Alibaba, DeepSeek to buy Nvidia H200 chips

China is moving to allow major domestic AI companies — including Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek — to purchase Nvidia's H200 AI chip, sources said, in a limited policy shift driven by a growing shortage of computing resources.

The Information, a US technology publication, reported Wednesday, citing multiple sources, that Chinese authorities recently notified leading technology companies they may be permitted to purchase Nvidia H200 graphics processing units.

The move comes roughly seven months after President Donald Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping that the United States would allow H200 exports to China, a conversation that took place last December.

To obtain approval, companies must submit detailed plans specifying the number of chips they need and their intended use.

However, the approved quantity is expected to fall below 200,000 units — less than half of what Chinese companies requested this year.

Beijing has also placed restrictions on how the H200 can be used.

The chips will be permitted only for training AI models and may not be used for inference — the process of running a completed AI model. For inference workloads, companies will be required to use Chinese-made AI chips, such as those from Huawei.

The H200 will also be limited to processing publicly available data and may not be used to handle sensitive information such as customer data.

The move is considered unusual given that China has in effect blocked Nvidia chip imports to protect its domestic semiconductor industry.

Industry observers say the policy shift reflects a tightening of AI computing resources, compounded by the US crackdown on Nvidia chip smuggling through Southeast Asia, which has also squeezed black-market supply.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited China as part of a business delegation during the US-China summit last May, though the H200 export issue was not a central agenda item at the time.

In an interview after the summit, Huang said he had "zero expectations" regarding the prospect of exporting H200 chips to China.

The H200 is an AI chip based on the "Hopper" architecture released in 2024, one generation behind the "Blackwell" chips currently on sale. It is two generations older than the next-generation "Rubin," expected to launch in the second half of this year, but still outperforms Chinese-made AI chips.

Meanwhile, The Information also reported that Nvidia is seeking approval to export its next-generation CPU for AI data centers, called "Vera," to China.