Nvidia H200 chips reportedly reach China as ByteDance and Tencent get 10,000 each

ByteDance and Tencent have each reportedly received about 10,000 Nvidia H200 artificial-intelligence chips in recent weeks, the first meaningful movement of export-approved H200s into mainland China since late 2025. Washington cleared the sales to vetted Chinese buyers in December 2025.

The deliveries, described by people familiar with the shipments, mark a cautious restart of high-end US chip flows into a market Nvidia had been largely shut out of. Chinese regulators are reportedly steering companies to route most of their US-licensed allowance — up to 100,000 chips per company — to Hong Kong rather than the mainland, a move that would ease pressure on domestic chipmakers while letting a smaller batch land in China proper.

The split points to Beijing’s competing priorities: access to Nvidia’s hardware now, against a longer-term push to build a homegrown alternative. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have together been approved to buy more than 400,000 H200 chips, with other Chinese firms queued behind them, and every purchase requires case-by-case sign-off from China’s National Development and Reform Commission.

None of this is confirmed by Nvidia or Chinese regulators, and the reported volumes remain a fraction of what these companies would need to close the gap with US cloud providers. The chips are also a generation behind Nvidia’s newest, leaving Chinese buyers with capable but not the latest silicon.

How quickly the remaining approved chips ship — and how many stop in Hong Kong rather than the mainland — will show whether this is a genuine reopening or a controlled trickle.