While some may point out the strange decision to sell 400.000 of the world's most powerful AI chips to a country regarded as a potential enemy of the USA the US government has surprisingly not been the bottleneck in the deal but the Chinese administration.
According to Reuters who claim to have sources with inside knowledge China has just approved the sale which would provide extreme AI processing power to DeepSeek an AI company that broke into the AI scene with shocking efficiency and a low price point. The drawback is that it is heavily moderated in real time and follows restrictions from the Chinese government in the form of "core socialist values".
ByteDance Tencent and Alibaba have already been given permission to buy more than 400.000 H200 chips on their own and DeepSeek will most likely be adding significantly to that pool. While no official numbers exist most analysts expect DeepSeek to have either 10.000 Nvidia A100 GPUs or at least 2000 H800 GPUs sold in the west as H100 the former top tier model. Others estimate that the number is closer to 10.000.
Given current pricing even without a DeepSeek purchase the total price at MSRP would exceed 16.000.000.000 USD. Or roughly the price of 64GB DDR5 if the price rise continues.