China clears ~10,000 Nvidia H200s each for ByteDance and Tencent
Beijing is permitting limited H200 imports — roughly 10,000 chips each to ByteDance and Tencent, per the Financial Times — under a US cap of 100,000 per company and NDRC sign-off on every order. The chips are two generations behind Nvidia's newest silicon, so this closes China's inference-capacity gap, not its frontier-compute gap, and Nvidia moves part of a half-million-unit H200 inventory while Beijing keeps steering demand toward Huawei.
Source: the-decoder.com ↗
The H200 is at least two generations behind Nvidia's most powerful chips, which China can't buy because of US export controls.
THE DECODER
Why this matters
- → China closes inference-capacity gap while staying two generations behind frontier compute
- → US export controls funnel demand toward Huawei; Nvidia liquidates half-million-unit H200 inventory
- → Chinese AI labs now competitive on capability but structurally constrained on scale
Two-tier tech race