As the United States continues to tighten export restrictions on high-end AI chips to China, major Chinese tech companies have not stopped their demand for advanced processors. Recently, China's Tencent was reported to have indirectly obtained NVIDIA Blackwell series chips, which were originally banned from being exported to China, through 'computing power rental' from Japanese operators, drawing public attention.
Export restrictions intensify, AI computing power gap emerges
Against the backdrop of the United States continuously tightening high-end AI chip export controls, China's AI industry is facing a significant shortage of high-performance computing resources.
Although officials are actively promoting the development of domestic AI chip supply chains, the related performance in large-scale, cutting-edge model training remains difficult to fully replace NVIDIA's high-end GPUs. In this context, large Chinese technology companies, including Tencent, have begun to seek alternative computing power sources that do not involve physical chip imports.
Bypassing physical exports, computing power rental becomes a solution.
According to informed sources, Tencent did not directly purchase restricted chips but used overseas cloud computing power rental to utilize NVIDIA's latest Blackwell series GPUs.
Since computing power rental (GPU Rental) has not been explicitly included in the current U.S. export control restrictions, it has become an operation model that is between compliance and sensitivity, but is still legally permissible.
Japanese cloud providers facilitate Datasection's pivotal role.
Reports indicate that Tencent's actual partner is the Japanese new cloud service provider Datasection. The company has deployed a large number of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs across Japan and Australia, with a total scale of about 15,000 processors.
Among them, the contract amount for computing power rental from a single large customer exceeds $1.2 billion, and that customer is Tencent, which cooperates with Datasection through third-party channels.
With the Blackwell series in place, performance is significantly ahead.
Insiders indicate that the equipment deployed by Datasection not only covers Blackwell B200 but has also introduced the newer B300 AI chips.
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 preferring to rent overseas computing power.
Bernstein analysts assess that the rental model is more attractive.
According to analysts from research firm Bernstein, for Chinese technology companies, continuing to adopt computing power rental models may offer more 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 installation, long-term maintenance, and compliance management.
Legal yet controversial, the boundaries of export control are being tested.
Although Tencent's related operations do not violate current U.S. 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 most cutting-edge U.S. AI technology; the method of acquisition is gradually shifting from 'purchasing chips' to 'renting computing power.'
This article discusses how Tencent bypasses U.S. chip export restrictions and obtains NVIDIA Blackwell through Japan, first appearing in Chain News ABMedia.