China has agreed to import its first batch of NVIDIA’s H200 AI chips after the government initially rejected the idea, Reuters reported. Several hundred thousand H200 chips were approved for sale in the country following NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang’s visit there last week, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The US government allowed the sale of NVIDIA’s H200 processors to vetted and approved companies in China late last year. The first sales have been allocated mainly to three unnamed Chinese internet companies and the government is accepting applications for future approvals, according to the sources.

NVIDIA’s most powerful AI chip, the Blackwell B200, is still restricted for export to China. Despite that, over $1 billion worth of those and other high-end NVIDIA chips made their way to China via black market sales, according to previous reports.

The H200 is NVIDIA’s second most powerful AI GPU behind the B200, which is reportedly 10 times faster for some jobs. However, the H200 is still far more capable than NVIDIA’s H20, which was the only chip approved for export to China prior to the Trump administration’s H200 approval in December. Initially, China’s government rejected that chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors.

China is trying to become self-reliant for its AI chips and infrastructure, with Huawei currently offering the best processors domestically. However, AI chip experts have said NVIDIA's tech is still far ahead of anything that Huawei or other Chinese companies can currently produce.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/china-finally-approves-the-first-batch-of-nvidia-h200-ai-gpu-imports-130000335.html?src=rss

©

California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that his office is investigating whether TikTok is truly censoring content critical of Trump, days after ByteDance finalized a deal to spin off its business in the US. Newsom made the announcement in response to a post on X, claiming that you can no longer send messages in the app with the word “Epstein” in it. Newsom’s office, in a separate post, said it was able to independently confirm instances wherein TikTok suppressed content critical of President Donald Trump.

The governor’s office told Politico that it tried to send a direct message with the word “Epstein” in it and got a warning that it could not be sent because it may violate TikTok’s community guidelines. Newsom’s team is now “launching a review of this conduct and is calling on the California Department of Justice to determine whether it violates California law.”

If you’ll recall, ByteDance finalized a deal for a new US entity just as TikTok was about to be banned in the US. ByteDance only owns 19.9 percent of the new entity called the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, while the new investors own 80 percent. Oracle, Silver Lake and Emirati fund MGX have a 15 percent stake each. The US business will now retrain TikTok’s algorithm on US data and will also be in charge of content moderation.

After the US entity’s announcement, users started complaining about technical issues affecting TikTok’s recommendation algorithm and other features. Some claimed that they had difficulties posting videos about ICE over the weekend. TikTok blamed its issues, including bugs, slower loading times and timed-out uploads, on a power outage at one of its US data centers. It said it’s now working to restore its services.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/california-will-investigate-tiktoks-alleged-censorship-of-anti-trump-posts-130000558.html?src=rss

©