China convened emergency meetings with its largest technology companies on Wednesday, December 10, to assess how many of Nvidia’s H200 accelerators they intend to buy, following President Donald Trump’s decision to allow exports of the chip to "approved customers" in the country. Representatives from Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent were asked to provide demand forecasts for the H200, according to reporting by The Information, as regulators consider whether to permit purchases and how to structure potential limits on the hardware.
According to the report, he meetings were led by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Both agencies have overseen AI chip procurement since the first round of controls took effect back in 2022, and both are now attempting to balance two conflicting pressures: China does not currently produce a domestic equivalent to the H200 for large-scale training workloads, yet the government continues to press companies to adopt homegrown silicon whenever possible. Officials requested estimates of each company’s H200 requirements earlier in the week and told attendees they would issue guidance once responses are reviewed.
