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China reportedly allows ByteDance and Tencent to import 10,000 H200 chips
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China has reportedly allowed ByteDance and Tencent to each receive 10,000 NVIDIA H200 chips to help train cutting edge AI models.
It enables ByteDance and Tencent to train frontier AI models and better compete with their American counterparts. China reportedly wants the companies to keep most of the chips out of the mainland to support its domestic chip industry.
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ByteDance and Tencent have each received 10,000 NVIDIA H200 chips over the past few weeks.
The US government previously banned H200 sales to China over military concerns, but later permitted NVIDIA to sell to approved Chinese customers in December 2025.
China’s authorities told the companies to ship processor orders to Hong Kong instead, even though they lack data centers there.
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The reported decision lets ByteDance and Tencent each bring in 10,000 NVIDIA H200 chips for AI training. This follows months of US export restrictions that barred the sale of H200 to China. The chips are intended to help train frontier AI models and improve competitiveness with American firms.
Adopting the chips requires significant infrastructure: power, cooling, and networking to support large-scale AI workloads. Because Chinese authorities want most chips kept out of the mainland, the firms must route orders through Hong Kong despite lacking local data centers. This adds logistical overhead and may increase latency for model training. Companies will also need to invest in software stacks that fully utilize the H200 architecture.
The arrangement has limits: each firm is allowed to purchase up to 100,000 chips, but China encourages keeping the bulk outside mainland factories. If the domestic chip industry cannot yet supply comparable accelerators, reliance on foreign hardware persists. Moreover, any shift in US policy could quickly revoke the permission to import.
Only one feed (Engadget/Financial Times) reported this development, so independent corroboration is absent. Without additional sources, the scale and timing of the shipments remain uncertain. Engineers should treat the information as preliminary until further confirmation appears.
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