China officially gets its hands on Nvidia H200 chips for the first time

Nvidia’s H200 GPUs have been authorized for import into mainland China by Beijing: Both Tencent and ByteDance got around 10,000 units. This is the first time that high-end US GPUs have been officially allowed into China. All shipments must be approved by China’s NDRC regulator, and there is no mention of the 100,000 unit cap per company that exists in the US.

The H200 is two generations old, but Chinese AI companies like Moonshot are starting to turn down customers due to a lack of computing power to train their own models. At the moment, the main constraint on Chinese AI development is a shortage of GPUs.