Unfortunately, last December the Trump administration approved export to China of Nvidia’s most powerful minus one microchip, the H200.
At least, though, Chinese companies and therefore the Chinese government would not be getting access to Nvidia’s very most powerful chips, like the B200. At least the summit of Nvidia chip power would be off limits to the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party.
But it seems that a firm like Beijing-based ByteDance can easily get around the export controls, which “allow clouds to be built and operated outside controlled countries.” If the reporting is accurate, ByteDance can exploit the B200 without having to cope with any U.S.-imposed impediment (Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2026).
TikTok’s Chinese parent, [Beijing-based] ByteDance, is assembling computing power with high-end Nvidia chips outside China to fuel its ambition of becoming a global artificial-intelligence leader.
ByteDance is working with a Southeast Asian company called Aolani Cloud on plans to use some 500 Nvidia Blackwell computing systems in Malaysia totaling around 36,000 B200 chips, people familiar with the matter said.
Aolani is buying these servers from Aivres, a company that assembles servers using Nvidia chips, the people said. If all the arrangements are completed, the hardware involved would likely cost more than $2.5 billion, they said….
Chinese companies are spending more to access computing power outside of their own country, in places where the application of the U.S. export-control rules is less well-established. That has given rise to an industry of middlemen who arrange for data centers to be built with Nvidia chips and lease the computing power to Chinese tech companies…..
An Nvidia spokesman said, “By design, the export rules allow clouds to be built and operated outside controlled countries” such as China. The spokesman said Nvidia’s compliance team cleared all its cloud partners before selling them chips directly or indirectly.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that ByteDance was in talks to use AI servers containing more than 7,000 B200 chips at a data center in Indonesia.
The Journal also notes that Chinese executives complain that U.S.-imposed limits on their “access to computing power is stifling their AI development.” To the extent that this is true, great; it means that the AI development that can be exploited by the Chinese government, which is always eager to lie, censor, surveil, and disrupt, is also stifled. To what extent is it true?
