China Approves Massive Nvidia Chip Buy for AI Expansion

The Government of China authorized Alibaba Group Holding Limited, ByteDance, and Tencent to purchase more than 400,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips. This state approval aims to support the expansion of domestic generative AI and mitigate ongoing trade tensions with the United States.

The move coincides with rapid technical advancements from Chinese AI developers. Moonshot AI, a company backed by Alibaba, upgraded its flagship model to Kimi K2.5 on January 27. The company claims the new model's video-generation and agentic capabilities outperform the three leading artificial intelligence models from the United States.

Alibaba furthered its domestic lead by launching the Qwen3-Max-Thinking model. Reports indicate this model surpassed its U.S. rivals on the Humanity's Last Exam benchmark, signaling a concerted effort by Chinese tech firms to compete with American AI leadership.