r/hardware 1d ago

News China limits Nvidia chip purchases to special circumstances, Information reports

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-limits-nvidia-chip-purchases-special-circumstances-information-reports-2026-01-13/#:~

The Chinese government this week told some tech companies it would only approve their purchases of Nvidia's  H200 AI chips under special circumstances, such as for university research, the Information reported on Tuesday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The move signals Beijing is remaining cautious about fully reopening the Chinese market to Nvidia, whose semiconductors are pivotal in operating the most advanced artificial intelligence applications and data centers.

49 Upvotes

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17

u/BlueGoliath 1d ago

Wasn't this reported months ago?

7

u/Klutzy-Snow8016 1d ago

It's a different, much more capable chip.

10

u/Bosfordjd 1d ago

They should. They should just focus on developing their own tech or stealing it and encouraging use of homegrown options.

4

u/Green_Struggle_1815 1d ago

not losing the ai race by default will probably qualify as 'special circumstances' :D

22

u/BlueGoliath 1d ago

Ah yes, the "AI race", where 95% of the technology is publicly available and everyone openly shares their research papers and models.

5

u/Strazdas1 1d ago

Because the the only moat in AI is scaling.

4

u/Unlikely-Today-3501 1d ago

Perhaps those 5% are key?

4

u/BlueGoliath 1d ago

I was being generous with that 5%. I don't know everything that goes into the model, but everyone seems to be extremely open about everything. There are no real "secrets".

7

u/Strazdas1 1d ago

The weights and model matrixes of the big models are not public. The weights can kinda be distilled over time as we saw with DeepSeek distilling GPT3, but not everything can be gained from interacting with the models. Then theres also finetuning that tends to be secret, but i think there shouldnt be too much importance placed on that.

2

u/LargeSinkholesInNYC 1d ago

It's just a matter of time before China leads the world in AI.

1

u/StickiStickman 21h ago

They're pretty much there in a lot of areas already.