China's Growing Access to Nvidia H200 AI Chips: Impact on Research, Military, and Data Centers

Beijing:

US President Donald Trump's decision to permit exports of Nvidia's H200 AI chip to China is expected to generate substantial demand from Chinese technology giants, research institutions, and defense-industrial entities.

While Beijing has not officially confirmed whether it will permit H200 chip sales in China, a Reuters investigation examining over 100 tenders and academic papers reveals that these chips are already reaching domestic buyers through unofficial channels.

This analysis highlights the various Chinese customers eager to make legitimate bulk purchases of the H200 chip, which significantly outperforms any Nvidia chip currently authorized for sale in the country.

Elite academic institutions across China maintain research teams dedicated to AI development, with their research capabilities directly tied to the quantity of advanced chips they possess.

At Beijing Jiaotong University, one professor promotes his laboratory's ownership of eight H200 chips, enabling sophisticated AI model research.

Researchers from the state-supported Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, alongside Sun Yat-Sen, Tsinghua, and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities, recently published a paper documenting their use of four Nvidia H200 processors to train an AI model that detects AI-generated images.

In June, a state-operated AI institute in Hefei issued a tender for a server equipped with eight Nvidia H200 chips to power a "quantum AI model" initiative.

The Reuters investigation identified dozens of universities and research institutes nationwide that have purchased or attempted to acquire H200 chips.

China hawks in Washington have criticized Trump's reversal of previous export controls, arguing that China's military would leverage Nvidia's most advanced AI chips to enhance its capabilities.

Evidence from the Reuters review indicates H200 chips are already finding their way to the People's Liberation Army and affiliated educational institutions.

In August, the PLA Air Force Medical University in Xian solicited tenders for eight Nvidia H200 chips to develop a large-language model training platform supporting medical AI and biosurveillance research.

Recently, the School of Cyberspace Security at Beihang University—one of China's "Seven Sons" universities under US sanctions with defense research connections—issued a tender seeking H200-level computing power rental services.

Chinese organizations increasingly rent server time on equipment containing restricted Nvidia chips as a strategy to access banned hardware without direct importation.

Even before Trump's announcement, various Chinese AI cluster and data center projects had targeted substantial quantities of H200 chips.

In Jiangsu province, a government-owned enterprise issued a July tender for 48 servers equipped with 384 H200 chips, scheduled for delivery by year's end.

More ambitious plans are emerging in Xinjiang, which has experienced significant AI infrastructure expansion as Chinese companies and authorities seek affordable land and electricity for massive data centers.

A June tender by Urumqi Jiangsuan outlines a 20,000-petaflop hub combining over 8,000 H200 GPUs, 12,000 RTX 4090 GPUs, and 4,500 servers with Huawei Ascend 910C processors, currently China's most powerful domestic AI chip.

A separate 1.86-billion-yuan project in Burqin county, northern Xinjiang, revealed in October 2024, details a green-energy compute center predominantly using 1,000 domestic chip servers, supplemented by a smaller cluster of 100 H100 or H200 chip servers.

The H200's less advanced predecessor, the H100, has been banned from export to China since late 2022.

In Hubei province, Xiaogan Yunqi Data Technology filed regulatory documentation in October for a 307 million yuan computing power project, planning to deploy 128 H200 servers for telecommunications giant China Unicom by March next year.