The Financial Times says China is easing its restrictions to help local companies train cutting edge AI models.
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ByteDance and Tencent have received 10,000 NVIDIA H200 chips each over the past few weeks, according to the Financial Times. China has reportedly allowed those processors to enter the mainland to give local companies a boost. NVIDIA’s chips would help them train frontier AI models, and thus help them better compete with their American counterparts. The Times says other Chinese companies could soon receive H200 shipments of the same size. Both companies are currently developing and training AI models and agents of their own.
If you’ll recall, the US government previously banned the sales of H200 to China due to concerns that it would aid the development of the country’s military technologies. It only allowed NVIDIA to sell the processors to approved Chinese customers back in December 2025, and by then, the H200 was already two years old. Reuters reported that China agreed to import several hundred thousand H200 chips in January. In May, Reuters also reported that the US gave 10 Chinese firms permission to purchase H200 processors, including ByteDance and Tencent.
Now, it looks like those processor shipments have finally started making their way to those approved firms. ByteDance and Tencent are allowed to buy up to 100,000 chips each, but China reportedly wants the companies to keep most of them out of the mainland because it also wants to support its domestic chip industry. China’s chip industry is booming these days, as local companies develop their own AI chips to end the country’s reliance on foreign products and in response to US export controls. The country’s authorities told the companies to ship their processor orders to Hong Kong instead, the Times reports, even though they don’t currently have data centers in the region.
