China starts list of government-approved AI hardware suppliers: Cambricon and Huawei are in, Nvidia is not
During his session with ministers, Xi urged officials to break the development bottlenecks currently plaguing its domestic tech industry through what he called a “whole-of-nation” approach. Chinese AI giant DeepSeek stunned the world just over a year ago when it released an LLM comparable to the leading models of OpenAI and Meta , but requiring around 11 times less compute, leading the company to a meteoric rise on the coattails of open-source AI.
Since then, we’ve seen an increase in Chinese policy support for the domestic AI and semiconductor industries as DeepSeek’s rise reinforced Beijing’s view that gains at the software level, along with coordinated deployment, can deliver credible results even under export pressure. Access to leading-edge foreign accelerators remains constrained by U.S. trade restrictions, even with the recent walking back of a ban on H200 exports , which Chinese officials have shunned .
Xi’s speech to ministers also carried a warning to provincial governments not to treat AI as an unchecked spending race. “When developing new quality productive forces, we must not blindly or recklessly rush in all at once,” he said, adding that China should not “abandon the old in favor of the new,” and that new technologies should be integrated into existing sectors and adapted to local conditions rather than imposing them uniformly.
There is real concern in China surrounding duplicated investments and heavily subsidized projects that have prioritized scale over all else; it’s understood that China has an excess capacity of compute power in underused, idle data centers. In July, it was reported that a national plan to sell off surplus data centers and regulate the growth and optimization of existing resources was in the works.
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/xi-jinping-calls-ai-epoch-making#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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