ByteDance and Tencent have reportedly started receiving shipments of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips inside China, a notable turn in the ongoing tech rivalry between Beijing and Washington.
The Financial Times reports that each company has taken in around 10,000 H200 processors over the past few weeks, following China’s decision to let the chips cross into the mainland. This gives two of China’s largest tech companies additional computing power to train advanced AI models and build out AI agents capable of competing with leading US systems.
This comes after months of uncertainty over whether China would actually let approved companies import the H200 at all, even after the US government eased its own export restrictions on the chip.
NVIDIA’s H200 And Chinese Tech Giants
The H200 ranks as Nvidia’s second most powerful AI chip, just behind the newer Blackwell B200. While the B200 remains off-limits for export to China entirely, the H200 still offers a meaningful jump in AI computing power over the H20, which had previously been the strongest chip approved Chinese buyers could get their hands on.
You may also like: Nvidia RTX 5070 12GB Laptop GPU: What You Need to Know
The US originally blocked H200 sales to China over concerns that Nvidia’s advanced chips could feed into Chinese military technology development. That policy shifted in December 2025, when the US began allowing Nvidia to sell H200 chips to vetted companies in China.
Reuters later reported that China agreed to import several hundred thousand H200 units total. ByteDance and Tencent were named among 10 Chinese companies reportedly cleared to purchase the chips, with each potentially able to buy as many as 100,000 units.
These first confirmed shipments suggest those approvals are now turning into real hardware landing in company hands. China has reportedly told companies to keep most of their H200 chips outside the mainland and route them through Hong Kong instead, an odd arrangement given that neither ByteDance nor Tencent reportedly runs data centers there currently.
Chinese AI Chips
These shipments matter because Nvidia’s hardware still sits well ahead of what China’s domestic chipmakers can currently offer, even as Beijing pushes hard for companies to shift toward homegrown processors.
Huawei currently leads China’s domestic AI chip market, but industry experts quoted in these reports say Nvidia still holds a clear performance lead. Access to H200 chips gives Chinese companies extra computing capacity to lean on while domestic alternatives continue catching up.
You may also like: Lenovo Legion 7 With Nvidia N1X Chip Accidentally Confirmed
China’s hesitance to lean too heavily on foreign chips likely explains why the government reportedly wants most of this newly approved Nvidia hardware kept outside the mainland. Beijing is walking a fine line here, trying to cut dependence on US technology while also building up its own semiconductor industry at the same time.
For Nvidia, this reopens a slice of an enormous market, even with its most advanced Blackwell chips still off the table for China entirely. For Chinese AI companies, getting hold of H200 chips could speed up model development at a moment when raw computing power has become one of the defining advantages in the broader AI race.
More shipments could follow soon. Other Chinese companies on the approved list are reportedly expecting deliveries of similar size. Whether these chips end up as a short-term bridge or a lasting piece of China’s AI infrastructure will come down to how Washington and Beijing handle the next round of export policy.
