By Mallika Mitra
Publication Date: 2025-12-15 05:01:00
ByteDance and Alibaba are shopping for stocking stuffers: Nvidia’s H200 chips.
The Chinese tech giants are looking to place orders for the semiconductor company’s second-best artificial intelligence chips now that President Donald Trump has given Nvidia the OK to export the processors to China in exchange for a 25% cut, Reuters reported.
Exactly when companies like the TikTok owner will actually be able to get their hands on these chips is unclear. The Chinese government has discouraged companies and government-funded data centers from buying Nvidia’s chips to give its domestic chip manufacturing a leg up. The Information reported that following Trump’s announcement, Chinese regulators held an emergency meeting with companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings to gauge the demand for H200s.
China’s Power
Trump’s green light of the exports is a retreat from a relatively simple decades-long policy: Don’t hand your best tech advancements over to your foes. Ultimately, the White House’s decision came down to the fact that China’s Huawei already offers AI systems with comparable performance, Bloomberg reported. The idea is that offering up Nvidia’s chips to Chinese companies will slow the country’s AI chip market by getting them hooked on the American stack.
While Nvidia still reserves its most advanced Blackwell chips for Americans, Chinese companies like AI start-up DeepSeek, developing their own AI systems, are…
