China allows ByteDance and Tencent to import Nvidia H200 AI chips after months of restrictions

Aug 19, 2026

ByteDance and Tencent have each taken delivery of roughly 10,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips, marking the first major movement of the processors since the U.S. approved exports in December 2025. However, Beijing is directing companies to keep the hardware in Hong Kong to protect its domestic chip industry. This routing strategy faces severe infrastructure hurdles, as Hong Kong's data centers lack the power capacity to run the massive IT loads. Meanwhile, Washington is moving to close loopholes that allow Chinese firms to remotely rent advanced Nvidia compute power from overseas facilities.

Nvidia H200 shipments

▪Lenovo and other Nvidia partners informed Chinese customers in August 2026 that they could resume orders for H200-based AI servers.
▪Other Chinese technology firms are expected to secure Nvidia H200 shipments of similar volumes shortly.
▪ByteDance and Tencent have each taken delivery of approximately 10,000 Nvidia H200 accelerators in recent weeks.

US export licensing

▪U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler told Congress on July 14, 2026, that only a very small, trivial quantity of Nvidia H200 chips had reached China.
▪The Financial Times reported a U.S. export ceiling of 100,000 Nvidia H200 chips per Chinese company, whereas Bloomberg previously reported a cap of 75,000 units.
▪The United States government cleared Nvidia H200 exports to approved Chinese customers in December 2025 in exchange for a 25% cut of every sale to the U.S. Treasury.
▪Nvidia halved its Asian customer list in July 2026 to tighten compliance with U.S. export controls.
▪The U.S. Department of Commerce licensed approximately 10 Chinese firms, including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and JD.com, to purchase Nvidia H200 chips by May 2026.

Beijing import restrictions

▪Chinese regulators directed ByteDance and Tencent to keep their licensed Nvidia H200 hardware outside of mainland China to support domestic chipmakers.
▪U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated in May 2026 that China's central government blocked chip purchases to focus investment on its domestic industry.
▪Beijing requires case-by-case approval from the National Development and Reform Commission for every Nvidia H200 purchase, which previously blocked orders from flowing.

Hong Kong routing strategy

▪The Northern Metropolis data center cluster in Hong Kong, awarded to Range Intelligent Computing in March 2026, is not scheduled to come online until 2029.
▪Hong Kong's 47 data centers total 581 MW of capacity, which is insufficient to power the full 100,000-unit Nvidia H200 allowances of Chinese buyers.
▪Hong Kong handled over $124 billion in Chinese chip imports between January and May 2026, representing more than half of China's chip imports.
▪Chinese regulators instructed companies to route their Nvidia H200 processors to Hong Kong, which operates outside mainland China's customs border.

Chinese AI model competition

▪Chinese firms including Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and Alibaba have recently released high-performing AI models, intensifying the AI race with Washington.
▪DeepSeek reportedly switched back to Nvidia hardware to train its R2 model after multiple failed attempts using Huawei Ascend chips.
▪Chinese labs increasingly run AI inference on domestic accelerators but still rely on Nvidia hardware to train frontier models.

Overseas cloud access loophole

▪Chinese firms including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have remotely accessed Nvidia chip compute power via data centers in Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan.
▪The proposed Remote Access Security Act, which seeks to expand U.S. export controls to remote cloud-based hardware access, passed the House of Representatives in January 2026.
▪White House official Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot AI of using Nvidia GB300 chips via a facility in Thailand shortly after releasing a new model in July 2026.
▪The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security is reviewing how Chinese firms rent remote access to offshore hardware they are restricted from owning.