DeepSeek has reportedly been given conditional approval by the Chinese government to buy Nvidia's AI GPUs
According to Reuters, two people "familiar with the matter" have said that the Chinese government has given approval for its top AI startup, DeepSeek, to buy Nvidia's H200 AI GPUs, with regulatory conditions that are still being finalised.
If these reports are true, it would mark a significant shift in China's previous reluctance to allow Nvidia's high-end hardware to be purchased by its top tech firms, and potentially mark the beginning of the end of a long-running saga between Nvidia and the US and Chinese authorities.
However, a Bloomberg report published yesterday quotes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as saying, "I’m hoping that the Chinese government would allow Nvidia to sell the H200... it's up to the Chinese government now but they are still deciding, and we are waiting patiently."
Huang's comments were given to reporters in Taipei on Thursday, prior to the Reuters report, so it's possible that the decision has been made internally since then. Or, as Reuters ' sources claim the regulatory conditions are "still being finalised", it's possible the Nvidia CEO is reluctant to confirm the arrangement as of yet.
DeepSeek made headlines last year after its newly-released open-source AI models looked to be comparable in performance and accuracy to OpenAI's efforts, leading some to call it "AI's Sputnik moment".
Given that these models were likely developed and trained on Chinese AI hardware, which is believed to be far less powerful than even Nvidia's last-generation AI GPUs, granting DeepSeek the right to buy H200 chips would likely give the AI startup a significant boost.
It's also been reported that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have been given permission to purchase more than 400,000 H200 chips in total, with other firms joining a queue for approval.
While the previous US administration implemented comprehensive restrictions on the export of Nvidia's high-end hardware to prevent China from gaining ground in the AI race (and among concerns they would be used for military technology), Nvidia's CEO has been openly critical of the policy:
"Depriving someone of technology is not a goal, it's a tactic. And that tactic was not in service of the goal", said Huang in an interview last year.
"Our mission, properly expressed... in order for America to have AI leadership", Huang continued, "is to make sure the American tech stack is available to markets all over the world, so that amazing developers, including the ones in China, are able to build on [the] American tech stack."
The current Trump administration has since approved the export of Nvidia's H200 chips to China. And while the Chinese government has since blocked shipments of H200 GPUs from entering the country, after a previous ban on its new state-funded data centres from using US AI hardware, it looks like those restrictions may soon be loosening for key companies, including DeepSeek.
In which case, if these reports are correct, both the Chinese and US governments now seem to be reaching something of an accord over Nvidia's prized hardware. For DeepSeek, this would potentially mean a bounty of new AI chips to train its new models with—the effects of which on the US-led AI market remains to be seen.