Nvidia H200 China delay
- U.S. officials said Nvidia has not yet sold its H200 AI chips to Chinese companies as of this week. - The hold-up reflects Chinese firms' difficulties getting permission from their own government despite January U.S. clearance. - The lack of H200 shipments highlights how export controls and national industrial policy are shaping enterprise AI hardware availability (reuters.com)
Nvidia still has not shipped its H200 artificial intelligence chips to Chinese customers, more than three months after Washington cleared those sales. (reuters.com) U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Wednesday, April 22, that Chinese companies have been struggling to get approval from their own government, and that those domestic hurdles have blocked purchases so far. (reuters.com) The Trump administration formally opened the door on January 13 for China-bound H200 exports under a new Bureau of Industry and Security rule that put those chips under case-by-case review with security conditions. (reuters.com, bis.gov) An artificial intelligence chip is the processor that trains and runs large models, and Nvidia’s H200 sits near the top of that market for data centers. China’s internet groups want those chips because they are used to build the computing clusters behind chatbots, search tools, and cloud services. (reuters.com, cnbc.com) Beijing appeared to move in late January when Reuters reported that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent had been cleared to buy a first batch of several hundred thousand H200 chips. By April 22, those approvals still had not turned into completed sales, according to Lutnick. (reuters.com, reuters.com) That leaves Nvidia caught between two governments. Washington now allows some H200 exports under restrictions, while Beijing is still deciding how much access Chinese companies should have to a U.S. chip that competes with China’s push to build domestic alternatives. (bis.gov, reuters.com) Nvidia has already told investors that China data-center revenue remains far below pre-control levels after U.S. restrictions tightened in October 2023. In its annual report for the year ended January 26, 2025, the company said China data-center sales were still well below the share seen before those controls. (sec.gov) The delay also shows that an export license is not the same as a shipment. For Chinese buyers, the H200 now depends on U.S. licensing terms, Chinese industrial policy, and the willingness of both sides to keep approving each step. (reuters.com, reuters.com)
