{"slug": "china-finally-lets-its-ai-giants-buy-nvidia-s-h200-chip-on-its-own-terms", "title": "China finally lets its AI giants buy Nvidia's H200 chip on its own terms", "summary": "China is allowing select AI companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, and DeepSeek to buy Nvidia's H200 chips after a year-long ban, as a stopgap to ease training bottlenecks while domestic chipmakers like Huawei and Cambricon catch up. The move follows U.S. approval in January and is capped at under 200,000 chips for training only, reflecting Beijing's strategy of using Nvidia as a temporary supplier.", "body_md": "*Beijing spent a year keeping its own AI champions away from Nvidia's H200, even after Washington cleared it for export. Now it's letting a handful of them buy the chip anyway.*\n\nThe reversal is almost self-inflicted. The Trump administration approved the H200 for sale to Chinese customers back in January, with volume caps, a security review and a certification that the chips wouldn't go to military end users. Chinese regulators, working toward chip self-sufficiency, simply told domestic firms not to buy it. Now, according to a report from The Information cited by Bloomberg on July 8, China's government is telling select companies, including Alibaba Group Holding, ByteDance and DeepSeek, that they can go ahead and place limited orders.\n\nThe South China Morning Post, citing a source with knowledge of the matter, described the shift as a \"middle-ground solution\" meant to \"temporarily ease the training bottleneck\" facing China's AI industry. That phrasing matters. Beijing's self-sufficiency drive hasn't gone anywhere: this is just buying it time. Analysts told the paper the move is a stopgap, not a retreat, while Huawei, Cambricon and other domestic chipmakers keep closing the gap.\n\nThe numbers show why the gap still matters. Huawei's Ascend 910C delivers roughly 12,032 units of total processing performance against the H200's 15,840, and its memory bandwidth trails at 3.2 terabytes per second versus 4.8 TB/s on the Nvidia part, according to comparisons reported by Tom's Hardware. Huawei says its next chip, the Ascend 950PR, is due in the first quarter of 2026, with a higher-memory 950DT variant to follow by year end. Cambricon's Siyuan 590 lags Huawei's own chip, though Cambricon's revenue jumped more than 300% in 2025, from a small base, per company disclosures.\n\nSo the H200 approval isn't a blank check. Reporting from Bloomberg and the SCMP indicates the total allocation across every approved buyer could land under 200,000 chips, and Beijing has told firms the parts are for training workloads only. Inference, the cheaper, higher-volume work of actually running trained models, is expected to stay on Huawei's Ascend line. Companies seeking approval reportedly have to explain why a domestic chip won't do the job first.\n\nThat's a telling condition. It tells you Beijing still sees Nvidia as a stopgap supplier for the hardest training runs, not a long-term vendor. DeepSeek's own history makes the case for why the bottleneck is real: the company built its R1 model on a smaller compute budget than its American rivals and still made headlines for it. Ambitious frontier models need the kind of raw training throughput that Huawei's chips, on current specs, still can't quite match.\n\nOn the American side, the export door has been opening gradually rather than all at once. CNBC reported in May that the U.S. had cleared H200 sales to 10 Chinese firms, and Lenovo confirmed around the same time that it was among the companies approved to sell the chip inside China. None of that mattered much while Beijing kept its own buyers on the sidelines. This latest move is what finally lets that U.S. approval translate into actual orders.\n\nNvidia has plenty riding on the outcome. CEO Jensen Huang has spent much of the year pushing for exactly this kind of breakthrough, arguing that keeping Chinese developers on Nvidia hardware and software serves American interests better than ceding the market to Huawei outright. Frankly, Beijing's approach reads like it's taking that argument seriously, just on its own terms: let Alibaba and ByteDance buy enough H200s to keep frontier training moving, while steering everyday inference workloads and long-term supply chain investment toward Huawei and Cambricon.\n\nWhat happens next depends on how fast Huawei's 950 series actually ships and performs. If the 950DT closes the memory bandwidth gap when it arrives late in 2026, Beijing will have less reason to keep any door open to Nvidia at all. Until then, a capped, training-only allowance for a handful of approved buyers looks like exactly what the sourcing describes: a bridge, not a policy reversal.\n\n**Also read:** [Mercor's Revenue Hit $2 Billion in June and the AI Data Race Isn't Slowing](https://startupfortune.com/mercors-revenue-hit-2-billion-in-june-and-the-ai-data-race-isnt-slowing/) • [Ollama Raises $65 Million as It Grows to Nearly 9 Million Developers](https://startupfortune.com/ollama-raises-65-million-as-it-grows-to-nearly-9-million-developers/) • [What Is MCP, the Model Context Protocol Powering AI Agents Now](https://startupfortune.com/what-is-mcp-the-model-context-protocol-powering-ai-agents-now/)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-finally-lets-its-ai-giants-buy-nvidia-s-h200-chip-on-its-own-terms", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/china-finally-lets-its-ai-giants-buy-nvidias-h200-chip-on-its-own-terms/", "published_at": "2026-07-09 15:20:08+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-09 15:25:21.977512+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-chips", "ai-policy", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Nvidia", "Alibaba", "ByteDance", "DeepSeek", "Huawei", "Cambricon", "Jensen Huang"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-finally-lets-its-ai-giants-buy-nvidia-s-h200-chip-on-its-own-terms", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-finally-lets-its-ai-giants-buy-nvidia-s-h200-chip-on-its-own-terms.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-finally-lets-its-ai-giants-buy-nvidia-s-h200-chip-on-its-own-terms.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-finally-lets-its-ai-giants-buy-nvidia-s-h200-chip-on-its-own-terms.jsonld"}}