No H200 chips sold to China
- The U.S. Commerce Secretary said Nvidia has not yet sold H200 AI chips to Chinese companies due to missing approvals. - Lutnick told lawmakers China had bought "zero" H200 chips as of now. - Those export constraints are limiting Chinese access to high‑end AI hardware and shaping infrastructure choices globally (reuters.com).
Nvidia has not sold any H200 artificial intelligence chips to Chinese companies because the required U.S. export approvals have not been granted. (reuters.com) U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told lawmakers on April 22, 2026 that China had bought “zero” H200 chips so far. In January 2026, the Commerce Department said H200 export applications to China would be reviewed case by case rather than approved automatically. (reuters.com) (bis.gov) The H200 is one of Nvidia’s high-end data-center chips for training and running large artificial intelligence models. Nvidia says the chip carries 141 gigabytes of HBM3e memory and 4.8 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth, which lets servers handle bigger models and move data faster. (nvidia.com) Washington has spent the past three years tightening rules on advanced chips to China, arguing they can support military and surveillance uses as well as commercial artificial intelligence. The Bureau of Industry and Security expanded those controls again in late 2023 and then revised chip licensing policy in January 2026. (bis.gov 1) (bis.gov 2) Those rules have already hit Nvidia’s China business on lower-spec products. Nvidia disclosed that on April 9, 2025 the U.S. government began requiring licenses for H20 exports to China, and the company later said it took a $4.5 billion charge tied to H20 inventory and purchase commitments after demand fell. (sec.gov) (nvidia.com) Nvidia had built H20 largely for the China market after earlier U.S. restrictions blocked more powerful chips. In its fiscal first-quarter results, the company said H20 sales reached $4.6 billion before the April 2025 licensing change, showing how large the China business had become even for a cut-down product. (nvidia.com) Nvidia later said there were no H20 sales to China-based customers in its fiscal second quarter, even as it sold some unrestricted H20 units outside China. That left China without shipments of both the custom H20 and the more advanced H200 as of the periods Nvidia has disclosed. (nvidia.com) The immediate result is that Chinese cloud groups and model developers still cannot buy Nvidia’s newer Hopper-generation chip through normal channels. Until Washington starts approving licenses, the headline number remains the one Lutnick gave Congress: zero. (reuters.com)
