Remember when DeepSeek crashed the stock market last year by claiming they didn’t need expensive American chips to build world-class AI? Well, the plot just twisted.
In a move that’s raising eyebrows from Silicon Valley to Beijing, the Chinese AI unicorn has reportedly secured “conditional approval” to acquire NVIDIA’s powerful H200 chips.
The Scoop
According to exclusive reports from Reuters (via Engadget), the Chinese government has greenlit DeepSeek—alongside tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent—to purchase these restricted GPUs.
This is a massive deal for two reasons:
- The “Irony” Factor: DeepSeek’s claim to fame was its “R1” model, which offered GPT-4 performance at a fraction of the cost. Buying premium NVIDIA hardware suggests that for their next leap (the rumored DeepSeek V4 coming in mid-February), they might need raw power after all.
- The Strings Attached: It’s not a free-for-all. Sources indicate Beijing is imposing strict “bundling” conditions, likely forcing these companies to buy domestic chips (like Huawei’s Ascend series) for every NVIDIA chip they import.
The Bigger Picture
This destroys the narrative that Chinese AI is fully “de-coupled” from US hardware. It also puts NVIDIA back in the hot seat; just as CEO Jensen Huang claimed he hadn’t received orders yet, US lawmakers are launching fresh probes into whether these chips could aid the Chinese military.
What’s Next?
Watch out for DeepSeek V4. If they combine their famous efficiency software with this new H200 hardware, the results could be terrifyingly fast.
