ByteDance and Tencent Receive First 10,000 NVIDIA H200 Chips Under Approved Import Limits

ByteDance and Tencent have received 10,000 NVIDIA H200 chips each over the past few weeks, according to the Financial Times. China has reportedly allowed those processors to enter the mainland to give local companies a boost. NVIDIA’s chips would help them train frontier AI models, and thus help them better compete with their American counterparts. The Times says other Chinese companies could soon receive H200 shipments of the same size. Both companies are currently developing and training AI models and agents of their own.

The NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU utilizes Hopper architecture equipped with 141 gigabytes of HBM3e high-bandwidth memory delivering 4.8 terabytes per second, designed specifically to handle large language model inference and training workloads. The hardware delivers 1.4 times the memory bandwidth and 1.8 times the memory capacity of NVIDIA’s preceding H100 system, addressing hardware memory bottlenecks for trillion-parameter neural network deployments. ByteDance relies on hardware clusters to run its Doubao foundation model family, while Tencent operates its proprietary Hunyuan infrastructure to support enterprise AI capabilities across its cloud computing ecosystem.

If you’ll recall, the US government previously banned the sales of H200 to China due to concerns that it would aid the development of the country’s military technologies. It only allowed NVIDIA to sell the processors to approved Chinese customers back in December 2025, and by then, the H200 was already two years old. Reuters reported that China agreed to import several hundred thousand H200 chips in January. In May, Reuters also reported that the US gave 10 Chinese firms permission to purchase H200 processors, including ByteDance and Tencent.

Now, it looks like those processor shipments have finally started making their way to those approved firms. ByteDance and Tencent are allowed to buy up to 100,000 chips each, but China reportedly wants the companies to keep most of them out of the mainland because it also wants to support its domestic chip industry. China’s chip industry is booming these days, as local companies develop their own AI chips to end the country’s reliance on foreign products and in response to US export controls. The country’s authorities told the companies to ship their processor orders to Hong Kong instead, the Times reports, even though they don’t currently have data centers in the region.

Chinese domestic chip manufacturing has expanded around alternatives like Huawei’s Ascend 910B silicon, though production yields at Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation remain constrained by sanctions on advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography systems. Chinese technology giants have historically constructed major server facilities in inland provinces such as Guizhou and Inner Mongolia under Beijing’s “East Data, West Computing” infrastructure initiative, leaving Hong Kong without equivalent mega-scale compute centers to absorb large-scale GPU deployments.