The U.S. government forbids Nvidia from selling some of its most advanced artificial intelligence chips to customers in China. But it doesn’t stop Chinese firms from buying or renting Nvidia’s chips if they’re used within the U.S.
Some big Chinese tech firms have taken advantage of that loophole, or tried to. ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has been renting Nvidia’s best chips from Oracle for AI computing, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement. China Telecom, a large state-owned wireless carrier, has sought a similar deal with other cloud providers, said two people who were involved in the talks. Meanwhile, Chinese cloud providers Alibaba and Tencent have held discussions with Nvidia about potentially obtaining such chips for data centers they would operate in the U.S., according to a person who has been involved in the talks.