Chinese companies are ramping up orders for Nvidia's H20 artificial intelligence chip due to booming demand for DeepSeek's low-cost AI models, six people familiar with the matter said.

Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance are said to have significantly increased orders of the H20 since DeepSeek gained global attention.

Rivals are still digesting the implications of R1, which was built with less-powerful Nvidia chips but is competitive with those developed at the costs of hundreds of billions of dollars by U.S. tech giants.