Chinese tech giants, including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, have placed orders worth at least $16 billion for Nvidia's (NVDA, Financial) H20 server chips in the first quarter of this year. These chips are intended for artificial intelligence (AI) model operations. Nvidia has not commented on the matter, and no responses have been received from Tencent, Alibaba, or ByteDance regarding the report.
Following tightened U.S. export controls implemented in October of the previous year, Nvidia redesigned the H20 chip with lower computational power to comply with regulations for sales in China. The demand for AI chips in China, spurred by the need for affordable AI models like those from DeepSeek, has significantly boosted Nvidia's orders in the region.