2025 has anything but quiet for the AI and semiconductor industry. While AI giants are making progress in their respective expertise, major semiconductor companies NVIDIA and AMD have been in the spotlight for backing such companies with their best AI chips.
Alibaba reportedly looking to buy AMD’s MI308 AI chip
Now, AMD has entered the scene after securing export license for the MI308, and agreeing to pay a 15% fee to the U.S. government on approved sales to Chinese customers. For those unaware, the MI308 AI chip is a trimmed down version of AMD’s premium offering. However, the good news is that it can handle large AI training and inference workloads.
According to a report by MLex, Alibaba is looking to buy nearly 40,000 to 50,000 MI308 chips. If that happens, it would mark one of AMD’s largest China-focused deals since the U.S. restricted sale/export of advanced AI chips to China. While the U.S. appears to be willing to allow limited shipments of compliant hardware, approvals remain tightly controlled.
As mentioned earlier, every sale comes with added cost and uncertainty. That being said, demand for advanced U.S.-made AI chips are at an all time high from Chinese big tech, like Alibaba and others. As you may know, China’s AI ecosystem has recently been focused on domestic suppliers such as Huawei and Cambricon to fill the gap left by Western chipmakers. All that said, neither AMD nor Alibaba has publicly confirmed or rejected the clsinscfo bresd,vmzee report.
NVIDIA to ship H200 chip by mid-February next year
When it comes to exporting AI chips, the Trump administration have multiple regulations in place to limit best tech from being exported to China. But, the government has loosened the grip a bit, and has given greenlight to NVIDIA as well, for exporting its most advanced H200 chip to its Chinese clients after demand went up drastically.
That reportedly made NVIDIA think about increasing production of the H200 AI chip. Earlier today, a new report claimed that the company has plans to ship the said chip by mid-February 2026.
