Tencent in China bypassed U.S. chip export restrictions by acquiring Nvidia's Blackwell through Japan.

As the United States continues to tighten restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips to China, large Chinese technology companies have not stopped their demand for advanced processors. Recently, it was revealed that Tencent has indirectly obtained the NVIDIA Blackwell series chips, which were originally banned from being exported to China, through “Computing Power rental” from Japanese operators, attracting outside attention.

Export restrictions intensify, AI Computing Power gap emerges

Against the backdrop of the United States continuously tightening export controls on high-end AI chips, China's AI industry is facing a significant shortage of Computing Power resources.

Despite the government's active promotion of the domestic AI chip supply chain construction, the related performance still struggles to fully replace Nvidia's high-end GPUs in the demand for large, cutting-edge model training. In this situation, major Chinese tech companies, including Tencent, have begun to look for alternative sources of Computing Power that do not involve the import of physical chips.

Avoid physical exports, Computing Power rental becomes a solution.

According to informed sources, Tencent did not directly purchase restricted chips, but instead used the latest Blackwell series GPUs from Nvidia by renting overseas cloud computing power.

Due to the fact that Computing Power rental ( GPU Rental ) has not been explicitly included in the current U.S. export control restrictions, it has become a mode of operation that is between compliance and sensitivity, but is still legal at present.

Japanese cloud service provider connects, Datasection becomes a hub

According to reports, Tencent's actual partner is the Japanese new cloud service provider Datasection. The company has deployed a large number of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in multiple locations in Japan and Australia, with a total scale of about 15,000 processors.

Among them, the computing power rental contract amount for a single large client exceeds 1.2 billion USD, and that client is Tencent, which is collaborating with Datasection through a third-party channel.

The Blackwell series is in place, with significantly superior performance.

According to sources, the equipment deployed by Datasection not only includes the Blackwell B200 but has also introduced the updated B300 AI chip.

Even if NVIDIA's Hopper architecture products ( such as H200) are allowed to be sold to China under certain conditions in the future, their overall performance will still have a significant gap compared to the Blackwell generation, which has become one of the important considerations for Chinese companies to prefer renting overseas Computing Power.

Bernstein analysts evaluate that the rental model is more attractive.

According to analysts from the research firm Bernstein, for Chinese technology companies, the continuous adoption of Computing Power rental models may provide greater cost and performance advantages than purchasing legally importable NVIDIA chips.

Analysis suggests that the computing power obtained through overseas cloud services is significantly higher than the hardware options available within China, while also avoiding additional burdens such as equipment setup, long-term maintenance, and compliance management.

Legal yet controversial, export control boundaries are being tested.

Although Tencent's related operations do not violate current US export control regulations, in the highly sensitive geopolitical environment of AI and semiconductors, it has sparked discussions in the White House about the effectiveness of current regulatory measures.

This shows that China has not completely decoupled from the cutting-edge American AI technology; rather, the method of acquisition is gradually shifting from “buying chips” to “renting Computing Power.”

This article states that Tencent from China bypassed U.S. chip export restrictions and obtained NVIDIA Blackwell through Japan, first appearing in Chain News ABMedia.