China Weighs Allowing ByteDance, Alibaba to Buy New Nvidia Chip, Report Says

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told some Chinese companies that the government intends to approve the purchases by firms including ByteDance and Alibaba, The Information reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. Reuters, which distributed the report, said it could not immediately verify it.

The report stops short of describing a finalized approval. Beijing has kept tight control over which Nvidia products domestic companies may import, even after the United States moved to ease export restrictions on some AI chips in late 2025.

Chinese officials have repeatedly told technology companies to buy domestic processors wherever possible and to justify any request for foreign chips with documented reasons, according to earlier reporting by Reuters.

This is not the first time Beijing has appeared to open a door. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that China had approved ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent to purchase more than 400,000 of Nvidia's H200 AI chips in total, a chip regarded as the company's second most powerful.

Sources told the news agency the licenses were so restrictive that customers had not yet converted the approvals into actual purchase orders.

Nvidia's accelerators remain the backbone of large-scale AI model training, and Chinese laboratories have been eager to get their hands on the latest generations.

Washington cut off China's access to Nvidia's A100 and H100 chips in 2022, and successive rounds of export controls forced Nvidia to design downgraded versions for the Chinese market.

Each adjustment to those rules has been read by investors and analysts as a barometer of both AI demand and the state of US-China technology relations.

Meanwhile, Beijing has poured resources into homegrown alternatives, most prominently Huawei's Ascend chip line, which Chinese hyperscalers have begun using at scale for inference workloads.

Earlier reporting suggests regulators are considering measures that would keep imported chips on a tight leash, including prioritizing domestic processors for inference, requiring each foreign purchase to be bundled with a set ratio of domestic chips, and offering energy subsidies to data centers that run on local hardware.

The reported new signal fits a pattern that analysts describe as a dual track: grant narrow, conditional access to foreign chips where gaps are most painful, while steering procurement toward domestic suppliers.

Four conditions have reportedly been attached to such purchases in the past, including requiring firms to justify quantities, restricting use to training on public data rather than large-scale proprietary inference, and capping the total authorized chips across participants.

Whether Sunday's signal turns into actual shipments will depend not only on Beijing's final decision but also on Washington's export-licensing position, which remains a separate and moving piece.

For now, it is a reported intent — and one that both Reuters and the original report treat as unconfirmed.

By Hamza Faisal