The US had been trying to lock China out of the AI chip market in favour of western companies. China was always going to catch up, but it would take time and its technology companies would flounder in the meantime.

However, it does not look like that will be the case as most of the big names were either able to get by on lower tech chips or order enough before the export ban came into place.

Tencent said that it has stockpiled Nvidia's H800 artificial intelligence accelerators, enough to develop its proprietary Hunyuan AI model for at least another couple of generations.

 President Martin Lau said on an analyst call after his outfit’s earnings announcements.

"Right now we actually have one of the largest inventories of AI chips in China among all the players," Lau said.

"We were the first to put in orders for H800 and that allows us to have a pretty good inventory of H800 chips. So we have enough chips to continue our development."

Elsewhere in China, AI industry veteran Kai-Fu Lee's unicorn startup 01.AI has been buying up the Nvidia chips it needs to develop its own foundation models, with Lee saying the company has enough semiconductors for the next 18 months.