China Lets Nvidia Chips Trickle In as Beijing Bolsters Domestic Tech Industry

China has begun to allow small batches of Nvidia's H200 chips into the country in an effort to support its domestic AI firms and help them keep pace with their US counterparts. The move comes as Beijing looks to bolster its own tech industry, which faces significant hurdles due to ongoing US export controls.

Nvidia's H200 chips are being made available to select Chinese companies, including ByteDance and Tencent, each of which has received around 10,000 processors. This allocation is a fraction of the total number allowed by the US, which permits up to 100,000 H200s per company.

Despite this limited availability, China's AI labs are rapidly advancing on the technical side, with several recent breakthroughs, including Moonshot's K3, Alibaba's Qwen3.8, and DeepSeek's V4. However, they continue to lag behind their US counterparts in terms of available inference capacity.

The move is seen as an effort by Beijing to support its own domestic tech companies, such as Huawei, which are struggling to compete with their US-based peers due to the ongoing trade tensions.