Nvidia's China Puzzle
- U.S. officials say Nvidia has not yet sold its H200 AI chips into China despite Washington's formal approval. - Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Chinese companies are struggling to obtain Beijing's permission to import the H200. - The gap shows that both U.S. export approvals and Chinese domestic permissioning now shape AI hardware revenues. (reuters.com)
Nvidia still has not booked H200 chip sales into China, even though Washington cleared the exports in January. (usnews.com) U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on April 22 that Chinese companies have not been able to get Beijing’s permission to buy the chips. He said, “We have not sold them chips as of yet.” (usnews.com) The U.S. side moved first. On January 13, the Trump administration gave formal approval for China-bound H200 sales, with conditions including third-party testing of the chips’ technical capabilities before shipment. (usnews.com) The H200 is a data-center chip built for artificial intelligence work such as training and running large models. Nvidia says the chip has 141 gigabytes of HBM3e memory and 4.8 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth, which lets it handle bigger models and data sets than the older H100 more easily. (nvidia.com) That makes China a revenue question as much as a policy question. Nvidia’s fiscal 2025 annual report showed China generated $17.1 billion of revenue, or 13% of total sales, before the latest round of export restrictions and approvals reshaped the market. (trendforce.com) Nvidia had already signaled that U.S. approval was not enough. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in late February that, while small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers had been approved by the U.S. government, the company had “yet to generate any revenue” from them. (cnbc.com) The January U.S. rule also drew criticism in Washington. Reuters reported at the time that China hawks objected to allowing shipments of Nvidia’s second-most-powerful artificial intelligence chip, even with the new controls. (usnews.com) By late April, the bottleneck had shifted to China’s side. Lutnick said Beijing was holding back import permission as it tried to keep investment focused on domestic chip companies instead of foreign suppliers. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) So the H200 is approved in Washington, blocked in practice in China, and still absent from Nvidia’s China revenue line. Until both governments say yes to the same shipment, the sale does not happen. (usnews.com)
