China's government has notified Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek that it will soon allow them to buy limited quantities of Nvidia's high-end H200 AI chips, according to reports. The total will be capped well below 200,000 units and restricted mainly to AI model training.
July 2026 · AI Chip Policy
China Eases Its Own Block on Nvidia's H200 — But Keeps It on a Tight Leash
Beijing will let Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek buy a capped quantity of high-end H200 chips — for AI training only, with domestic chips still pushed for inference and sensitive data.
<200K
New total cap on H200 units across approved firms
3
Firms notified: Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek
<½
Share of what the companies originally requested
FROM REQUEST TO REALITY
January's conditional approval covered 400K+ chips. The latest limited go-ahead lands well below that.
400K+
Jan 2026
→
<200K
Jul 2026
H200 PERFORMANCE EDGE (vs prior chips)
+76%
Memory capacity vs H100 (141GB HBM3e)
+43%
Memory bandwidth vs H100 (4.8 TB/s)
1.9×
Llama2-13B inference throughput vs H100
FP8: up to 3,958 TFLOPS
TDP: 700W
Price guide: $30K–$45K / GPU
ALLOWED
AI model training on capped H200 quantities — after firms justify amount, purpose and why domestic chips can't be used.
STILL STEERED HOME
Domestic chips (e.g. Huawei Ascend) encouraged for inference and sensitive data — seen as a temporary loosening, not a market opening.
Notably, the barrier being eased was China's own — not a U.S. rule. Washington had already cleared H200 exports, granting licenses of up to ~75,000 units each to roughly 10 firms . Beijing had held off on buying, citing supply-chain security reviews.
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