Reuters recently reported that China had given DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, conditional approval to purchase NVIDIA’s H200 AI chips. News of the approval came about earlier in the week, with initial reports saying that the AI startup was being allowed to purchase more than 400,000 units of the high-end accelerators.
At the time of this publication, NVIDIA hasn’t appeared to have given a statement on the news, with its CEO, Jensen Huang, having said that he had no idea of any such news at the time, and that, as far as he knew, China was still finalising the license. In addition to DeepSeek, the country’s government had also approved the purchase of H200 Chips for three other major companies: ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent.
DeepSeek came into the spotlight at the start of last year, when it debuted its AI model, with claims that it trained it on a budget of US$6 million (~RM23.7 million). That claim came into question, with analysts suspecting that the company may have had actually incurred US$1.6 billion (~RM6.31 billion) in hardware cost, and supposedly had 50,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs in stock. This, at a time when the US government, both previous and current, had enacted some really strict sanctions and trade restrictions of its technology on its Asian rival.
That said, China’s approval does run in line with a report in December last year that its government had held “emergency meetings” with several of its local tech companies over the future of NVIDIA’s H200 Chips. More than likely, these approvals are a sign that the CCP has relented and perhaps, even acknowledged that the US-based GPU brand’s products are still leaps and bounds ahead of the curve when it comes to AI.
(Source: Reuters)
