By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, Dec 10 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s move to allow exports to China of Nvidia’s second-best artificial intelligence chip, the H200, will spur strong demand from the country’s tech giants, research institutes, and its defence-industrial complex.
Beijing has not yet confirmed whether it will allow the chip to be sold in China, but a Reuters review of more than 100 tenders and academic papers shows it is already being supplied to domestic buyers via the grey market.
The analysis shows the nature of customers in China who will jump at the chance for legal bulk buys of the H200 chip, which is many times more powerful than any chip Nvidia is allowed to sell there.
ELITE UNIVERSITIES AND RESEARCH INSTITUTES
China’s leading universities all have research teams focused on AI development, and the number of high-end chips they have at their disposal directly affects talent recruitment and research.
One professor at Beijing Jiaotong University advertises that his laboratory owns eight H200 chips, allowing for AI model research.
Researchers at the state-backed Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Sun Yat-Sen, Tsinghua, and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities used four Nvidia H200 processors to train an AI model designed to detect whether an image is AI-generated, they showed in a paper published last month.
In June, a state-run AI institute in the eastern city of Hefei issued a a tender for a server equipped with eight Nvidia H200 chips to power a “quantum AI model” project.
Dozens of universities and research institutes nationwide have bought or sought to acquire H200 chips, the Reuters review showed.
CHINESE MILITARY AND AFFILIATED ENTITIES
China hawks in Washington have balked at Trump’s moves to reverse the previous administration’s export controls, saying the Chinese military would use Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to turbocharge its capabilities.
The Reuters review suggests H200 chips are already making their way into the hands of the People’s Liberation Army and closely-linked universities.
In August, the PLA Air Force Medical University in Xian issued a tender for eight Nvidia H200 chips to train a large-language model training platform to support medical AI and biosurveillance research.
On Monday, the School of Cyberspace Security at Beihang University, one of China’s “Seven Sons”, or universities under U.S. sanctions with a history of defence-related research, issued a tender seeking a supplier that could rent out H200-level computing power.
