H200 chips: zero sales to China
- U.S. commerce official Howard Lutnick said Nvidia’s H200 AI chips have not been sold to Chinese companies yet. - The South China Morning Post reported Beijing has bought 'zero H200 chips as of today', reflecting domestic gatekeeping. - That underscores how both export controls and Chinese policy are constraining top‑end AI chip flows, even as adjacent suppliers remain active (reuters.com)(scmp.com)(digitimes.com)
Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence chip still has not reached Chinese buyers, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s Senate testimony on April 22. (reuters.com) Lutnick told senators that China had bought “zero H200 chips as of today,” and he said Beijing was also trying to protect its own semiconductor industry while Washington weighed military risks. (scmp.com) The H200 is one of Nvidia’s Hopper-generation data-center processors, built 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 makes it faster at moving the huge volumes of data that modern AI systems use. (nvidia.com) China’s absence from the H200 customer list comes after months of mixed signals about whether the chip could enter the market at all. In January, the South China Morning Post reported that Beijing had begun approving H200 imports and that more than 400,000 chips had been cleared for companies including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. (scmp.com) Washington’s rules have also kept shifting. The Commerce Department said on May 12, 2025, that it was rescinding the Biden-era Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule issued on January 15, 2025, while adding other chip-related export controls. (bis.gov) That leaves Nvidia caught between two sets of gatekeepers: U.S. officials deciding what can be exported and Chinese officials deciding what can be imported. Lutnick’s remarks point to both constraints operating at the same time on a chip that sits near the top of Nvidia’s product stack. (reuters.com) (scmp.com) The freeze at the top end has not stopped business around the edges of the AI hardware chain. DigiTimes reported this week that Victory Giant Technology, a China-based printed circuit board maker tied to Nvidia’s supply chain, jumped on its April 21 Hong Kong stock debut as it pitched expansion tied to AI demand. (digitimes.com) Nvidia’s China business still matters even with those restrictions. In its annual report filed in February 2025, the company said customers in China, including Hong Kong, accounted for 13% of revenue in fiscal 2025. (sec.gov) For now, the picture is unusually stark: a flagship AI chip that Beijing once appeared ready to admit is still sitting at zero completed sales into China. (reuters.com) (scmp.com)
