# China lets Nvidia's H200 chips trickle onto the mainland to help its AI firms keep pace with the US > Source: > Published: 2026-08-19 13:57:22+00:00 # China lets Nvidia's H200 chips trickle onto the mainland to help its AI firms keep pace with the US **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. The 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/). Chinese 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. ``` AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe 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. Subscribe now ``` [FT](https://www.ft.com/content/6c5650fb-969d-4d4e-80d6-8d11002a8cf7)