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, Tencent was exposed for indirectly obtaining NVIDIA Blackwell series chips, which were originally prohibited from being exported to China, from Japanese companies through "computing power leasing," drawing widespread attention.
Increased export restrictions exacerbate AI computing power shortage.
Against the backdrop of the United States continuing to tighten export controls on high-end AI chips, China's AI industry is facing a significant shortage of high-performance computing resources.
Despite the government's active promotion of building a domestic AI chip supply chain, the performance of domestically produced chips still falls short of fully replacing NVIDIA's high-end GPUs for large-scale, cutting-edge model training. In this context, major Chinese technology companies, including Tencent, have begun seeking alternative sources of computing power that do not involve importing physical chips.
Avoiding physical exits, computing power leasing becomes a solution.
According to sources, Tencent did not directly purchase the restricted chips, but instead used Nvidia's latest Blackwell series GPUs by leasing overseas cloud computing power.
Because GPU rental is not explicitly included in the scope of current U.S. export controls, it has become a legal operating model that lies between compliance and sensitivity.
Datasection becomes the hub, facilitated by Japanese cloud computing providers.
The report indicates that Tencent's actual partner is Datasection , a new cloud service provider in Japan. This company has deployed a large number of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in various locations in Japan and Australia, totaling approximately 15,000 processors.
Among them, the computing power rental contract of a single large customer exceeded US$1.2 billion, and that customer was Tencent, which cooperated with Datasection through a third-party channel.
Blackwell series arrives, offering significantly superior performance.
Sources indicate that the equipment deployed by Datasection not only includes Blackwell B200, but also incorporates the newer B300 AI chip.
Even if NVIDIA's Hopper architecture products (such as H200) are approved for sale in China under certain conditions in the future, their overall performance will still be significantly different from that of the Blackwell generation. This is one of the important considerations for Chinese companies to prefer renting overseas computing power.
Bernstein analysts assess that the rental model is more attractive.
According to analysts at research firm Bernstein , for Chinese technology companies, continuing to use the computing power rental model may be more cost-effective and efficient than purchasing legally imported Nvidia chips.
Analysts believe that the computing power obtained through overseas cloud services is significantly higher than the hardware options available in China, while also avoiding the additional burdens of equipment setup, long-term maintenance, and compliance management.
Legal yet controversial, export control boundaries are being tested.
Although Tencent's actions did not violate current U.S. export control regulations, in the highly sensitive geopolitical environment of AI and semiconductors, it has sparked discussions within the White House about the effectiveness of current control measures.
This shows that China has not completely decoupled from the most cutting-edge US AI technology; it's just that the way it acquires it is gradually shifting from "purchasing chips" to "renting computing power."
This article, which discusses how Tencent bypassed US chip export restrictions and obtained Nvidia's Blackwell chip through Japan, first appeared on ABMedia, a ABMedia .
