Beijing just dealt a seismic shift to the US-China tech cold war. While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang toured Shanghai restaurants and fruit markets this week, Chinese regulators quietly approved the sale of over 400,000 H200 AI chips to the country's tech giants—a dramatic reversal of Biden-era export controls that had banned the sale of advanced semiconductors. The move marks the culmination of Huang's year-long lobbying campaign in Washington and signals that Trump's White House is betting on a radically different strategy: keeping China dependent on American chips rather than locking them out entirely.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang looked remarkably relaxed this week, biking through Shanghai and sampling beef hot pot in Shenzhen. He had every reason to be upbeat. While he was making the rounds, Beijing dropped a bombshell that could reshape the global AI chip market for years to come.
China approved the sale of hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's powerful H200 AI chips to major Chinese tech companies, according to reports from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. The approvals cover more than 400,000 chips destined for ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent under conditional licenses granted during Huang's visit, with more approvals expected in coming weeks.
The timing isn't coincidental. This represents the payoff from Huang's aggressive lobbying campaign in Washington over the past year, and it marks a stunning reversal of American tech policy toward China. Under the Biden administration, the US sharply tightened export controls on high-end AI chips and explicitly barred models like the H200 from being sold to Chinese customers. The restrictions aimed to prevent Beijing from developing powerful AI systems with military applications or other sensitive uses.
