ZTE, the Chinese telecoms giant, has been given approval by the US government to purchase NVIDIA’s H200 AI Chips. The company is one of three Chinese companies that have received the approval.
While it’s still not NVIDIA’s most advanced and current Blackwell-based AI chips, the H200 series is still formidable and certainly more powerful at running large AI models, compared to the H20 chips that Chinese companies were initially allowed to purchase.
To be precise, ZTE Kangxun Telecom and server maker Maginfra were permitted to purchase the H200 chips, while the third Chinese company, Zhuhai Hengqin Yunxiang Zhisheng Network Technology, was allowed to purchase AI chips from NVIDIA rival, AMD.
Those companies now join a list of other Chinese companies given the greenlight to purchase the NVIDIA H200 AI Accelerators. Prior to this, ByteDance and DeepSeek were given conditional approval by the Chinese government to purchase said GPUs.
On that note, it should go without saying that any purchase of the NVIDIA H200 AI chips will still need to be signed off by Beijing, and more specifically, China’s Ministry of Commerce.
The ongoing economic war between the US and China has, for lack of a better word, crippled NVIDIA’s dominance in the Chinese market. At least, according to the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang.
In a press conference in Taipei last year, Huang said that because of the sanctions, NVIDIA saw its market share of 95% in China virtually disappear overnight. For better or worse, that meant that other Chinese AI chip makers were scrambling to fill the gap and meet the demand for the components.
To be clear, NVIDIA already received permission to continue selling its H200 chips to China, albeit with some stringent conditions from the Trump administration, which were added on after the current US government kind of strong-armed the company into giving 25% of all the chips’ sales in China to its coffers.
(Source: Reuters, Tom’s Hardware)
