A report said DeepSeek has received approval from the Chinese government to purchase Nvidia H200 AI chips.
Engadget, citing Reuters, reported on Jan. 30 that Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance were also approved to buy a total of 400,000 H200 GPUs, and that the U.S. government imposes a 25 percent tariff on the chips.
China is trying to foster its domestic AI chip industry, but it cannot ignore Nvidia's technological edge. The H200 chip is 6 times more powerful than the H20. It offers the second-strongest performance after Nvidia's top-end B200 chip. DeepSeek's purchase is boosting AI competitiveness in China while also sparking controversy in the United States.
The U.S. government is investigating suspicions about cooperation between Nvidia and DeepSeek. Some U.S. lawmakers previously claimed Nvidia supported the development of DeepSeek's AI model and that the technology was used by the Chinese military. Nvidia countered that its ties with DeepSeek were a typical relationship with a private company and were unrelated to military use.
Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)
delight@d-today.co.kr