China AI Giants To Buy 200,000 Nvidia H200s If Beijing Clears Import Truce

Chinese tech giants are lining up to buy hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs—despite Beijing’s own homegrown chip ambitions.

According to Bloomberg, China may approve commercial H200 GPU imports in early 2026, contingent on purchasing domestic chips. Alibaba and ByteDance plan to order 200,000+ H200s each if cleared by Beijing. The H200 lags behind Blackwell/NVL72 but outperforms China's homegrown chips and Nvidia's H20.

U.S.-China trade tensions led to 2025 bans on H20/RTX 5090D exports, but a truce in July 2025 allowed limited H20 licenses. Beijing previously barred purchases of U.S. RTX Pro 6000D, claiming domestic chips are now competitive.

A 2026 approval could accelerate AI model training for Chinese firms competing with OpenAI/LLMs. The Chinese government faces a dilemma: foreign tech access versus semiconductor industry growth. Smaller startups will also seek H200s for LLM development.