China’s artificial intelligence developers are expected to welcome Washington’s go-ahead for Nvidia to ship its H200 AI chips to approved customers on the mainland, according to analysts, even as Beijing continues to drive the country’s tech self-sufficiency efforts.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, US President Donald Trump said he had informed his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, of that decision “under conditions that allow for continued strong national security”. Xi had “responded positively,” Trump added.
A strong demand exists for the H200 from China’s AI developers because the Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) still outperformed domestic AI chips, especially in terms of computing power and memory bandwidth on a single-card basis, according to semiconductor industry analyst Zhang Haijun.
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For many Chinese developers, Zhang said a large part of their code was based on Nvidia’s Hopper GPU microarchitecture, which was purpose built for AI and high-performance computing.
That means the H200 chips could be used immediately by Chinese developers without rewriting their code, “which is what these Big Tech companies like the most”, Zhang said. He added that the impact of H200 sales would be “minimal” on domestic GPUs, which are mostly used in inference tasks as opposed to the more demanding training tasks.
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The H200 was introduced by Nvidia in 2023 after the Biden administration’s roll-out of rigid tech export controls in 2022, which restricted the company’s sale of advanced H100 GPUs to China for national security reasons.
While approval of the H200 shipments to China marked a successful lobbying effort in Washington by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the US chip designer now faced stronger domestic competition from the likes of Huawei Technologies, Cambricon Technologies, Moore Threads Technology and MetaX Integrated Circuits.