Alibaba

The New York Times reported that Aivres, a California server maker, had exported at least US$5.6 billion of advanced technology to Southeast Asia between April 2024 and February 2026, including more than US$3 billion of computers carrying Nvidia's Blackwell chips, and that those servers ultimately served Chinese customers including ByteDance and Alibaba. Aivres is Inspur Group's US subsidiary and is not itself on the Entity List, though Inspur was added in 2023. Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo said the company does not support product diversion and sells only to well-known partners that work with Nvidia to comply with export control rules. Federal officials had begun looking into the subsidiary's business.

Reuters reported that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked ByteDance, Alibaba and other companies to report plans to purchase NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 chips. The report described the request as recent and did not establish a precise date.

Reuters reported that the United States had cleared roughly 10 Chinese companies to buy H200 chips. The report said deals had stalled and deliveries had not begun.

Reuters reported that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent had been approved to purchase more than 400,000 H200 chips in total. The report described the approvals as conditional and cited anonymous sources.

Reports citing people familiar with the talks said Alibaba was considering buying 40,000 to 50,000 MI308 accelerators, priced around $12,000 each and roughly 15 percent below Nvidia's H20, in what would be AMD's largest China AI deal since the controls began. AMD had excluded MI308 from its guidance, so any order would be upside.

The Financial Times reported, and The Register relayed, that the Cyberspace Administration of China had ordered Alibaba, ByteDance and other companies not to order Nvidia's China-specific RTX Pro 6000D Blackwell GPU.

The Financial Times reported that Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba had ordered about 100,000 A800 processors worth US$1 billion for delivery that year, and a further US$4 billion of GPUs for 2024, rushing to secure supply amid fears of further U.S. export controls. Demand for the compliant part was intact two months before the October 2023 rules removed the test it was designed around.

Nvidia said it had modified its flagship H100 into a version legal to export to China, the H800, and that the cloud computing units of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent were already using it. It was the same move as the A800 applied to the newer generation, and Jensen Huang pointed Chinese startups building large language models at those clouds.