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China Moves to Approve Limited H200 Buys for Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek

July 10, 2026 at 10:30 EDT

Infra & Chips
Policy & Regulation
Foundation Models

China's government has told Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek they may soon receive approval to purchase Nvidia's H200 AI GPUs, though the quantity will be capped and the chips will be reserved primarily for AI training.

AI Chip Policy · Beijing

China to Let Its Top AI Firms Buy Nvidia H200 — But Caps the Numbers

Beijing plans to approve limited H200 purchases for Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek — reserved mainly for AI training. Total approvals are expected below 200,000 units, less than half of what the firms first requested.

<200K

Total unit cap now planned

Main target firms: Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek

Training

Chips reserved mainly for AI model training

Volume tightened, roughly halved

January reports cited 400,000+ conditional approvals. The latest plan narrows the volume to under half.

400K+

January
conditional

→

<200K

Latest
planned cap

The balancing act

US licenses
~10 Chinese firms cleared to buy H200

Beijing held back
Prioritizing domestic chips (Huawei Ascend)

Now easing
Limited approvals for training only

Not yet confirmed

No actual purchase, delivery or usage cases have been confirmed, and delivery timing is undetermined. How far this narrow easing satisfies demand remains the open question — though markets read even a limited opening as a positive for Nvidia.

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