China plans allow top AI firms limited Nvidia H200 purchases training only capped 200000 units
Alibaba $BABA, ByteDance and DeepSeek may soon buy Nvidia $NVDA H200 chips again: Beijing plans to allow limited purchases for AI training only, reportedly capped below 200,000 units, per the South China Morning Post. Inference stays reserved for domestic chips, right where the v
Beijing plans to let its top AI companies, including Alibaba $BABA, ByteDance and DeepSeek, buy limited quantities of Nvidia $NVDA H200 chips, as reported by the South China Morning Post and the Japan Times. Reports point to total shipments capped below 200,000 units, a case-by-case approval process in which companies must state quantities and intended use, and a training-only restriction: inference workloads are expected to run on domestic processors. The design of the carve-out says more than the headline. China's AI firms face a computing crunch that domestic suppliers cannot yet resolve at the frontier-training level, and the training-only rule is an admission of exactly where the gap sits. At the same time, reserving inference, the larger long-run market, for domestic chips keeps local suppliers protected where volume will actually accumulate. For Nvidia the opening is real but tightly bounded. A cap below 200,000 units limits the revenue upside, and case-by-case approvals give Beijing a dial it can turn down at any point in the US-China technology dispute. The likelier outcome is a managed dependency: enough H200s to keep Chinese frontier labs in the race, few enough to keep pressure on domestic chipmakers to close the gap.