The US approval for Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence processors will give China a much-needed boost in computing power rather than pose a direct threat to domestic chips, even though the US chip is more powerful than rivals from Huawei Technologies and Moore Threads, according to analysts.
With a total processing performance (TPP) of 15,832, the H200 has surpassed all AI chips made by domestic vendors on the market so far as well as Nvidia’s H20, which was previously the most advanced Nvidia processor allowed to be shipped to China, according to a report from Bernstein Research. TPP measures how many calculations a chip can complete per second.
The H200, the latest generation of Nvidia’s Hopper-series chips, is an advanced version of the H100, which has been banned from export to China since 2022.
The H200’s export greenlight by the Trump administration is expected to provide a boost to China’s major cloud service providers, including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and ByteDance, which need the chips to build cloud infrastructure and support proprietary AI models. Alibaba owns the Post.
Domestically, rivals to the Nvidia chip included processors made by Huawei and Alibaba’s chip design unit T-Head, according to the Bernstein report.
Huawei’s Ascend 910C, which reportedly started production earlier this year, has a TPP of 12,800, while Alibaba’s PPU 2.0 is estimated to reach a similar level, though its production status remains unclear.
