Nvidia H200 Exports Boost Odds of a World That ‘Runs on Chinese AI’  

ByteDance and Alibaba are shopping for stocking stuffers: Nvidia’s H200 chips. 

The Chinese tech giants are looking to place orders for the semiconductor company’s second-best artificial intelligence chips now that President Donald Trump has given Nvidia the OK to export the processors to China in exchange for a 25% cut, Reuters reported.

Exactly when companies like the TikTok owner will actually be able to get their hands on these chips is unclear. The Chinese government has discouraged companies and government-funded data centers from buying Nvidia’s chips to give its domestic chip manufacturing a leg up. The Information reported that following Trump’s announcement, Chinese regulators held an emergency meeting with companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings to gauge the demand for H200s. 

China’s Power 

Trump’s green light of the exports is a retreat from a relatively simple decades-long policy: Don’t hand your best tech advancements over to your foes. Ultimately, the White House’s decision came down to the fact that China’s Huawei already offers AI systems with comparable performance, Bloomberg reported. The idea is that offering up Nvidia’s chips to Chinese companies will slow the country’s AI chip market by getting them hooked on the American stack. 

While Nvidia still reserves its most advanced Blackwell chips for Americans, Chinese companies like AI start-up DeepSeek, developing their own AI systems, are nipping at the heels of their US competitors. Some experts say the damage may be done:

• “Compute is our main advantage,” Rush Doshi, assistant professor at Georgetown University and former deputy senior director for China and Taiwan affairs with the Biden National Security Council, said on X. “China has more power, engineers and the entire edge layer — so by giving this up, we increase the odds the world runs on Chinese AI.”  
• The exports will “boost China’s ability to both develop frontier AI models and deploy them widely, competing with US AI and cloud companies abroad,” added Tim Fist, director of emerging technology policy at the think tank Institute for Progress. “The new Chinese stack will be NVIDIA chips, Tencent/Baidu/Alibaba cloud, and DeepSeek/Qwen/Kimi models.” 

Breaking Rules: DeepSeek is reportedly already using Blackwell chips that were illegally smuggled into China, according to The Information.  (Nvidia denies knowing anything about these so-called “phantom data centers.”)