H200 Chips Unsold in China
- U.S. officials report Nvidia’s H200 AI chips, though cleared for export, have not been sold to Chinese buyers. - Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told lawmakers zero H200 chips had been sold to China 'as of today'. - The gap shows Chinese approvals and industrial policy, not just U.S. export rules, can block frontier hardware deals (reuters.com) (scmp.com).
Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence chip has not been sold to buyers in China, even after Washington cleared exports. (reuters.com) U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told lawmakers on April 22 that China had bought “zero” H200 chips “as of today.” He made the remark while answering questions about whether U.S. chip sales could aid China’s military. (reuters.com) (scmp.com) The H200 is one of Nvidia’s top data-center graphics processing units, the chips used to train and run large artificial intelligence models. Nvidia says the H200 was its first GPU with HBM3e memory, with 141 gigabytes of memory and 4.8 terabytes per second of bandwidth. (nvidia.com 1) (nvidia.com 2) Washington had approved China-bound H200 sales in January 2026, according to South China Morning Post reporting at the time. That left Nvidia with U.S. permission to sell a chip that still sat behind Chinese purchasing and approval decisions. (scmp.com) Chinese regulators had also begun approving imports for major tech groups, with South China Morning Post reporting on January 28 that more than 400,000 H200 chips were cleared for ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. Lutnick’s testimony indicates those approvals had not yet turned into completed sales by April 22. (scmp.com 1) (scmp.com 2) That gap puts the latest U.S.-China chip fight on two tracks. U.S. export rules still decide what Nvidia may ship, but Beijing’s industrial policy and import approvals also shape what Chinese companies can actually buy. (reuters.com) (scmp.com) Chinese analysts and industry watchers had said demand existed because Nvidia’s Hopper-based chips still outperformed many domestic alternatives on computing power and memory bandwidth. At the same time, they said Beijing was likely to keep pushing self-reliance in semiconductors over the longer term. (scmp.com 1) (scmp.com 2) So the immediate picture is unusual: a legal path exists, named Chinese buyers have been reported, and the U.S. commerce secretary still says the sales count is zero. (reuters.com) (scmp.com)
