H200 chip sales blocked
- Nvidia’s H200 AI chips have not been sold into China despite earlier U.S. export approvals. - U.S. commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said Chinese firms are struggling to get permission from their own government to import H200s. - The hold-up shows semiconductor access is being constrained by industrial-policy decisions on both the U.S. and Chinese sides. (reuters.com)
Nvidia still has not sold its H200 artificial intelligence chips into China, even after Washington cleared exports in January. (usnews.com) U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on April 22 that Chinese companies are having trouble getting approval from their own government to import the chips. Reuters reported his remarks from Washington. (usnews.com) The U.S. side changed course on January 13, when the Commerce Department said export licenses for Nvidia H200 and AMD MI325X chips would be reviewed case by case for China. The rule followed President Donald Trump’s December 8, 2025 announcement that approved customers in China could buy H200-class chips under new conditions. (bis.gov; politico.com) An AI chip is the processor that trains and runs large language models, and the H200 is one of Nvidia’s higher-end versions for data centers. Nvidia says the H200 is its first graphics processing unit with HBM3E, a faster stacked memory, and lists 141 gigabytes of memory and 4.8 terabytes per second of bandwidth. (nvidia.com) Those details matter because China had already been pushed onto weaker Nvidia products after earlier U.S. controls. Reuters reported in 2025 that the H20 was the most advanced Nvidia AI chip the company could still sell into China before Washington tightened licensing again. (techcrunch.com; finance.yahoo.com) The new holdup shows the bottleneck is no longer only in Washington. The United States opened a narrow legal path for H200 sales, but Chinese authorities have not yet let domestic buyers complete imports, according to Lutnick’s account reported by Reuters. (usnews.com; bis.gov) That leaves Nvidia caught between two industrial policies at once. Washington is deciding which advanced chips can leave the United States, while Beijing appears to be deciding which foreign chips Chinese companies can bring in. (usnews.com; bis.gov) Chinese state media on April 23 framed the delay partly around U.S. policy uncertainty and security concerns, citing analysts after Lutnick’s comments. Nvidia had not completed any China H200 sales as of April 22, so the practical result was the same: approval on paper, but no chips delivered. (globaltimes.cn; usnews.com) For now, the H200 remains a chip both governments have touched and neither market has actually moved. The next test is whether Chinese buyers get import clearance before Washington changes the rules again. (usnews.com; bis.gov)
