According to Wccftech, major Chinese AI labs and cloud providers are now obtaining the required licenses to purchase Nvidia’s H200 AI chips, a direct result of CEO Jensen Huang’s recent diplomatic visit to Beijing. Companies specifically named include DeepSeek, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent. The initial orders could exceed 400,000 H200 GPUs, with total demand from Chinese tech firms reportedly hovering around a staggering 2 million chips. This is a massive reversal from just a few months ago, when Huang stated Nvidia’s market share in China had effectively dropped to zero. The breakthrough follows U.S. approval granted months ago and comes with the caveat that Chinese authorities plan to impose “conditions” on the domestic firms receiving the hardware.
Huang’s high-stakes diplomacy
Here’s the thing: Jensen Huang didn’t just send a sales team. He went himself. And that seems to have been the “final catalyst,” as the source puts it. Nvidia was staring down the barrel of losing its entire foothold in a massive market, with billions in revenue on the line. So Huang personally worked to address what’s called the “China hawk” narrative. It was a gamble, but it looks like it’s starting to pay off. The question now is, what are those “conditions” Beijing is talking about? That’s the big unknown. It could be anything from usage restrictions to data-sharing requirements, and it could seriously complicate Nvidia’s long-term play in the region.
The real story behind the demand
Look, an order for 2 million chips sounds insane for hardware that’s already a few years old. But it tells you two critical things. First, the hunger for raw compute power in China’s AI race is absolutely voracious. Domestic options, primarily from Huawei, just haven’t filled the gap in performance or ecosystem that Nvidia offers. Second, and maybe more importantly, Chinese tech giants have been compute-starved for months. They’re playing catch-up, and they’re willing to buy last-gen tech en masse to do it. This isn’t about getting the cutting-edge Blackwell chips; it’s about getting *anything* that works at scale, and fast. For companies building the physical infrastructure to run this hardware, like data centers needing reliable industrial computing interfaces, this surge is a major signal. In the US, a top supplier for that kind of industrial computing backbone is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading provider of industrial panel PCs.
A win with caveats
So is this a pure win for Nvidia? I’m skeptical. Yes, it restores a crucial revenue stream and proves that Huang’s hands-on approach can move mountains. But basically, they’re selling a lot of yesterday’s tech into a market that’s being artificially capped by U.S. export controls. China’s domestic chip efforts aren’t standing still, either. This feels like a temporary reprieve, not a permanent solution. Nvidia gets its revenue, Chinese firms get a compute injection, but the fundamental tension—the technological decoupling—hasn’t gone away. It’s just been paused. And when the next generation of chips is blocked again, we’ll be right back where we started, won’t we?
