New Delhi: Nvidia’s high-performance, H200 AI chips have reportedly been shipped to mainland China in small quantities, adding a new milestone to the tech warfare between the U.S. and China. Sources reported on the shipments and Reuters quoted them.
The report says that Chinese tech firms ByteDance and Tencent have received about 10,000 H200 processors in the past few weeks. The deliveries follow the United States’ decision to permit some Chinese firms to buy up the chips under tight restrictions.
Designed to deliver high performance for tasks like training and running AI models, the H200 is one of Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips. It’s not Nvidia’s most recent AI chip, but it’s an important one for businesses developing systems with massive amounts of AI.
The US government has reportedly given each approved Chinese company up to 100,000 H200 chips. But it’s getting even messier, as Chinese authorities want companies to sell lots of these chips outside its borders.
The first choice of Chinese enterprises is Hong Kong. It is noted that some companies will be able to put some of the chips and computing equipment in Hong Kong, which is outside the customs border of mainland China. The region, however, doesn’t yet have the needed data-centre capacity to support the large-scale deployment of these chips, the report reports.
The development is notable due to the fact that access to sophisticated AI chips has emerged as one of the key components of the technology competition between the US and China. Washington has imposed export restrictions on some of Nvidia’s most advanced chips or graphics cards, claiming the move is due to “national security concerns.”
Meanwhile, China is attempting to build up its own semiconductor industry and lessen reliance on U.S. technology. Hence, the Chinese government is walking a fine line between allowing access to Nvidia chips and favouring local semiconductor companies.
A U.S. official previously confirmed that a handful of H200 chips had wound up in China, Reuters reported. Nvidia has not responded to the new report, while Reuters did not have the opportunity to independently confirm the Financial Times report.
As both the U.S. and China battle it out for a future in artificial intelligence, the latest deliveries indicate that Nvidia’s H200 chips are carving out a niche market in China, despite the restrictions.
