{"slug": "china-lets-nvidia-s-h200-chips-trickle-onto-the-mainland-to-help-its-ai-firms-us", "title": "China lets Nvidia's H200 chips trickle onto the mainland to help its AI firms keep pace with the US", "summary": "China is allowing small batches of Nvidia's H200 chips onto the mainland to help domestic AI firms compete with the US, with ByteDance and Tencent each receiving around 10,000 H200 processors, according to the Financial Times. The H200 is at least two generations behind Nvidia's most powerful chips, which China cannot buy due to US export controls, and purchases require approval from China's NDRC planning agency.", "body_md": "# China lets Nvidia's H200 chips trickle onto the mainland to help its AI firms keep pace with the US\n\n**China is letting small batches of Nvidia's H200 chips onto the mainland to help domestic AI firms in the race with the US.** According to the Financial Times, ByteDance and Tencent each received around 10,000 H200 processors, and more companies could follow soon. The [H200 ](https://the-decoder.com/nvidia-unveils-new-h200-gpu-for-ai-and-hpc-workloads/)is at least two generations behind Nvidia's most powerful chips, which China can't buy because of US export controls.\n\nThe US allows up to 100,000 H200s per company, but [Beijing wants to support its own makers like Huawei](https://the-decoder.com/china-reportedly-tightens-nvidia-h200-restrictions-limits-purchases-to-special-cases/). Shipments to Hong Kong are also allowed, but the city lacks data centers and power. Purchases also need sign-off from the [NDRC planning agency](https://the-decoder.com/china-blocks-metas-2-billion-acquisition-of-ai-startup-manus/).\n\nChinese labs are catching up on the technical side. Moonshot with [K3](https://the-decoder.com/moonshot-ai-releases-kimi-k3-open-weights-and-infrastructure-after-shaking-up-the-frontier-model-race/), Alibaba with [Qwen3.8](https://the-decoder.com/alibabas-qwen-team-releases-qwen-3-8-models-with-open-weights-under-the-apache-2-0-license/), DeepSeek with [DeepSeek V4](https://the-decoder.com/deepseek-launches-an-improved-v4-pro-model-raises-api-prices-and-makes-its-agent-software-open-source/), and most recently Z.ai with [GLM-5.3](https://the-decoder.com/zhipu-ai-releases-glm-5-3-claims-its-the-strongest-open-weights-coding-model/). But they lag far behind US providers on available inference capacity. After a surge in demand, Moonshot had to [turn customers away](https://the-decoder.com/moonshot-pauses-new-kimi-k3-subscriptions-after-gpu-demand-maxes-out-in-48-hours/). Nvidia keeps about half a million H200s in stock.\n\n```\nAI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans\n\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive \"AI Radar\" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.\t\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe now\n```\n\n[FT](https://www.ft.com/content/6c5650fb-969d-4d4e-80d6-8d11002a8cf7)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-lets-nvidia-s-h200-chips-trickle-onto-the-mainland-to-help-its-ai-firms-us", "canonical_source": "https://the-decoder.com/china-lets-nvidias-h200-chips-trickle-onto-the-mainland-to-help-its-ai-firms-keep-pace-with-the-us/", "published_at": "2026-08-19 13:57:22+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-19 14:13:26.480851+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-chips"], "entities": ["Nvidia", "ByteDance", "Tencent", "Financial Times", "H200", "Huawei", "NDRC", "Moonshot"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-lets-nvidia-s-h200-chips-trickle-onto-the-mainland-to-help-its-ai-firms-us", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-lets-nvidia-s-h200-chips-trickle-onto-the-mainland-to-help-its-ai-firms-us.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-lets-nvidia-s-h200-chips-trickle-onto-the-mainland-to-help-its-ai-firms-us.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-lets-nvidia-s-h200-chips-trickle-onto-the-mainland-to-help-its-ai-firms-us.jsonld"}}