No H200 chips to China

Nvidia still has not shipped any H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, even after Washington cleared those sales in January. (reuters.com) U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on April 22 that Chinese companies have not bought the chips yet because they have had trouble getting permission from China’s government. Reuters reported the same day that total sales remain at zero. (reuters.com) Nvidia had already signaled the stall two months earlier. On its February 25 earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said the U.S. government had approved only “small amounts” of H200 products for China-based customers and that Nvidia had “yet to generate any revenue” from them. (cnbc.com, nvidia.com) The H200 is one of Nvidia’s highest-end chips for training and running large artificial intelligence models in data centers. China has been a major market for Nvidia’s AI business, but U.S. export controls have repeatedly cut off or narrowed what the company can sell there. (nvidia.com, cnbc.com) Washington changed course on January 13, when the Trump administration issued a rule allowing China-bound H200 sales under conditions, reversing the previous presumption of denial. The move was meant to restart trade in a chip that sits below Nvidia’s top Blackwell products but above many earlier China-compliant offerings. (reuters.com) Beijing then appeared to open a path on January 28. Reuters and CNBC reported that China had approved a first batch of H200 purchases for several hundred thousand chips, with ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent among the companies cleared to buy. (reuters.com, cnbc.com) That left Nvidia with approvals on paper in both countries but no delivered product. By late February, Kress said Nvidia did not know whether imports would actually be allowed into China, and by April 22 Lutnick said none had been sold. (nvidia.com, reuters.com) The delay is landing as Chinese cloud and artificial intelligence companies look for more computing power and as Nvidia warns that local rivals are gaining ground. CNBC reported in February that Nvidia was already flagging stronger competition in China while its approved H200 sales remained stuck. (cnbc.com) For now, the headline is narrower than the January policy shift suggested: the H200 is legal to sell under U.S. rules, some Chinese buyers were reportedly cleared to purchase it, and yet Nvidia still has no China H200 revenue to show. (reuters.com, reuters.com, reuters.com)