Chinese officials have apparently assembled its domestic tech leaders to gauge the needs they have for Nvidia’s (NVDA) H200 processors and to consider setting limits on how many can be ordered, according to The Information.
The meetings were held with executives from Alibaba Group (BABA), ByteDance (BDNCE) and Tencent Holdings (TCEHY), the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. The meetings were organized by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Officials are now expected to inform these companies of the government’s decision.
The meetings followed U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement on Monday that the U.S. will allow Nvidia to ship its H200 chips to approved customers in China. The U.S. had previously allowed Nvidia to ship its less powerful H20 chips to China, but these chips are better equipped for inference and not as capable of handling the training of advanced large language models.
The Chinese government had used the H200 ban to push local chipmakers to develop domestic processors to compete with Nvidia. Now China must determine if it should allow domestic companies to use Nvidia’s H200 chips while continuing to foster homegrown semiconductor development.
Alibaba and ByteDance have already approached Nvidia about buying its H200 chips since the Monday announcement.
However, a separate report by The Information finds that DeepSeek (DEEPSEEK) has already been using banned Nvidia chips to develop AI models.
The ban on exporting advanced chips to China has affected Nvidia’s revenue. For example, in its most recent earnings, Nvidia reported revenue from China and Hong Kong for the quarter ended October 26 totaled $2.9B. This was down significantly from the $8.14B reported during the same quarter one year prior. Despite the export ban on certain chips, Nvidia still increased its total revenue by 62% year over year during the third quarter.