China is reworking its approach to artificial-intelligence hardware, and the moves point in two directions at once: buying foreign chips where useful, and building homegrown alternatives fast.
According to reports cited by Analytics India Magazine and CNBC-TV18, China plans to let a small group of its top AI firms purchase limited quantities of Nvidia's H200 chips — a high-end processor used to train and run advanced AI models. CNBC-TV18 notes that China's commerce ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and that Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek did not respond outside regular business hours.
At the same time, a domestic push is gathering force. A report from economy.ac frames the trend as "patriotic consumption" extending to AI chips, describing China's homegrown effort as a new variable reshaping the global AI race.
That shift is already rattling investors. According to NDTV Profit, shares of Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Micron and Sandisk fell by as much as 14% on concerns tied to DeepSeek's move toward developing its own in-house chips — a signal that one of China's leading AI companies may lean less on American suppliers over time.
Together, the reports sketch a balancing act: Chinese firms gaining narrow access to premium Nvidia hardware even as they invest in cutting the cord.
Why it matters: If China's biggest AI players can both tap limited foreign chips and scale domestic ones, the companies that have dominated AI hardware could see their most important growth market — and their stock prices — grow far less certain.