China expected to approve H200 imports in early 2026, report claims — tech giants Alibaba and ByteDance reportedly ready to order over 200,000 Nvidia chips each if green-lit by Beijing

China is expected to allow its tech giants to finally import Nvidia H200 chips about a month after President Donald Trump approved its export to its Asian rival. Sources say that Beijing will allow domestic corporations to purchase these chips for commercial use, as reported by Bloomberg. However, it seems that this won’t be a blanket approval — instead, it will likely come with caveats, like requiring companies to buy a number of homegrown chips alongside their imports. Furthermore, military, sensitive government agencies, critical infrastructure, and state-owned enterprises aren’t allowed to acquire and use these American-made chips due to security concerns.

The H200 is one generation behind the latest Blackwell AI GPUs, and with the upcoming Vera Rubin NVL72 now in production, it’s expected that the H200 will further fall behind in performance. However, it’s still relatively much more powerful than Nvidia’s H20 chips, which the company made in response to the White House’s bans, and the latest offerings from homegrown chip manufacturers in China.

Because of this, local tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance are reportedly gearing up to order over 200,000 H200 AI GPUs, each, once they receive approval from Beijing. Smaller startups are also expected to place orders for these chips, which are crucial for training their latest models that would allow them to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other LLMs from the U.S.

This news of impending approval and massive interest is great news for Nvidia, especially as its market share in China has essentially fallen to zero from a high of 95% just a few years earlier. This was caused by the increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, with a trade war between the two sides resulting in a complete ban of Nvidia’s most powerful offerings to China in April 2025, including those specifically made to follow Washington, D.C.’s earlier limitations like the H20 and RTX 5090D.

This was lifted in July of the same year, with the U.S. government promising that it will grant export licenses for the H20 soon. However, it was Beijing’s turn to enact a ban, preventing its biggest tech companies from purchasing China-specific hardware like the RTX Pro 6000D, claiming that its homegrown chips are now as capable as these offerings.

The situation between the two rivals have softened recently, though, with the U.S. and China agreeing on a one-year tariff truce. And even though Blackwell's availability wasn’t discussed between the two parties, it seemed that China was able to win some concessions from the U.S. for allowing the sale and export of Nvidia’s last-generation AI chip.

This is a win for both Nvidia and Chinese AI companies, although we still don’t know how it will affect local chip manufacturing. Beijing’s dilemma at the moment is how it will balance the need of its AI tech companies for the latest, most powerful chips and the advancement of its homegrown semiconductor industry. But even as the Chinese CCP is considering how it will approach this problem, Chinese tech giants are already lining up to get their share of Nvidia’s H200 AI GPUs.

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