China tells Alibaba and other tech giants to line up Nvidia H200 orders

Bloomberg and Market Watch contributed to this report.

China has quietly told its biggest tech companies – think Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance – that they can start preparing orders for Nvidia’s powerful H200 AI chips, a sign Beijing may soon formally approve imports of the processors that power large-scale AI systems. That’s a big deal for the tech world and for Nvidia’s pipeline into the world’s biggest internet market.

Officials have given in-principle clearance for those firms to move to the next step: negotiating how many chips they want and who will handle the purchases. In short: the door is open to planning, even if the final sign-off is still forthcoming.

There’s a catch – Beijing wants to protect its own chip industry. Regulators are expected to push companies to buy a portion of domestic chips as part of the approval package, although no firm quota has been announced. Expect a trade-off: access to Nvidia kit in return for a boost to China’s homegrown suppliers.

Why it matters: Nvidia’s H200 is among the most sought-after AI accelerators for data centers and large language-model training. Granting Chinese cloud and internet giants the ability to lock in H200 supplies would be a major step toward revving up AI projects in China – and a rare bit of good news for US chip exports after a period of rocky relations. It also signals Beijing is trying to square tech security concerns with economic pressure to keep AI momentum going.

What to watch next: will regulators set a domestic-chip floor that’s painful for hyperscalers? How fast will orders translate into shipments and deployment? And, crucially, how will this affect global AI competition – both for Nvidia’s stock and for rivals scrambling to sell into China? For now, China’s move is a carefully worded “almost yes”: companies can prep orders, but the final handshake depends on Beijing’s terms.