NVIDIA is technically allowed to sell AI accelerator components to Chinese companies, specifically the NVIDIA H200 which was specifically developed for AI training and inference in the country.
However, after the sales ban was lifted by the US government, the Chinese government has limited the number of companies allowed to buy and use the components because at that time many Chinese data center component manufacturers had also started offering their own AI accelerator components, such as Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and so on.
However, it has recently been reported that two of the largest technology companies in China, Tencent and ByteDance have started receiving shipments of 10,000 NVIDIA H200 AI accelerator components each for the purpose of training their respective AI models.
The Financial Times report says that this is the first phase of the component shipments, as both Tencent and ByteDance are now apparently allowed to buy up to 100,000 of the components. However, not all of these components will be shipped to China as the government wants the majority of these AI accelerators to be out of the country.
The Chinese government still seems to want big tech companies to use domestically produced components to reduce their reliance on foreign AI components. However, they may also realize that it will still be a few years before Chinese-made components can compete with offerings from companies like NVIDIA and AMD.
For purchases made by ByteDance and Tencent that cannot be shipped to China, they appear to be using Hong Kong as a storage location before they are shipped to their other data centers.
