China convened emergency meetings with its largest technology companies on Wednesday, December 10, to assess how many of Nvidia’s H200 accelerators they intend to buy, following President Donald Trump’s decision to allow exports of the chip to "approved customers" in the country. Representatives from Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent were asked to provide demand forecasts for the H200, according to reporting by The Information, as regulators consider whether to permit purchases and how to structure potential limits on the hardware.
According to the report, he meetings were led by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Both agencies have overseen AI chip procurement since the first round of controls took effect back in 2022, and both are now attempting to balance two conflicting pressures: China does not currently produce a domestic equivalent to the H200 for large-scale training workloads, yet the government continues to press companies to adopt homegrown silicon whenever possible. Officials requested estimates of each company’s H200 requirements earlier in the week and told attendees they would issue guidance once responses are reviewed.
The H200 sits one generation below Nvidia’s new Blackwell platform but remains vastly more capable than the export-compliant H20 that was built specifically for the Chinese market. The H20 contributed just $50 million in revenue during Nvidia’s October quarter, compared to $4.6 billion in the period earlier this year when the company could still ship H100-class processors into China. Nvidia’s overall China revenue fell 63% year over year to about $3 billion in the same quarter. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has since said that Nvidia has virtually no market share left in China.
Trump’s approval of H200 exports follows a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and introduces a new mechanism for moving high-end GPUs into China. Chips manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan would be imported into the United States for security reviews, taxed at 25% and then re-exported to approved Chinese buyers. U.S. officials told The Information that the arrangement was designed as a middle ground whereby Blackwell remains off-limits, but a complete ban on H200 shipments was viewed as likely to accelerate China’s domestic chip development.
Chinese regulators, meanwhile, are considering restrictions of their own. One proposal would cap the amount of Nvidia hardware a company can buy relative to its existing and planned purchases of domestic accelerators. Another would bar H200 use in sectors regarded as strategically sensitive, including finance and energy. If adopted, these measures would be communicated through informal “window guidance”, the same method authorities used earlier this year when they urged companies to avoid Nvidia hardware and prioritize suppliers such as Huawei.
If Beijing authorizes H200 imports, demand is expected to be substantial. Companies are said to have begun preliminary discussions with Nvidia about potential orders after Bloomberg first reported in November that the U.S. was weighing approval, and, according to Reuters, the likes of Alibaba and ByteDance are said to be “keen” to begin purchasing Nvidia’s chips. For now, China’s policymakers are attempting to determine how to meet short-term AI training needs without undermining the long-term push for semiconductor self-reliance
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