US licenses 75,000 H200 chips to 10 Chinese firms; Beijing unmoved
Washington approved Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and seven others to buy up to 75,000 H200 chips each during trade talks, but China's January export restrictions and domestic-chip push mean adoption will remain minimal.
The United States cleared roughly ten Chinese companies—including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance—to purchase Nvidia H200 GPUs during bilateral negotiations in China this week. Each firm can now license up to 75,000 chips under U.S. export rules, a ceiling that would theoretically supply a mid-sized training cluster.
Beijing's response has been measured. China imposed its own restrictions on foreign chip purchases in January 2025, and officials signaled no intention to reverse course. The policy shields domestic foundries—SMIC, Biren, and Moore Threads among them—that are ramping 7 nm and 14 nm AI accelerators with state backing. Letting U.S. chips flood back in would undercut that industrial strategy at a fragile moment.
Supply-chain leverage
Chinese trade negotiators read the 75,000-unit cap as a leash, not a gift. Washington preserves Nvidia's China revenue—H200 cards still list above $30,000 each—while keeping total compute below the threshold that would let Chinese labs train frontier models at OpenAI or Anthropic scale. The arrangement leaves American export-control lawyers with a veto over every shipment, a dependency Beijing spent two years trying to escape.