US approves Nvidia H200 chip sales to ten Chinese firms
The US government approved Nvidia H200 AI chip sales to roughly ten Chinese companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and JD.com. Lenovo and Foxconn received clearance to distribute the chips inside China. No shipments have occurred yet with deliveries expected no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2026. The approvals cover about 750,000 units and represent a limited easing of prior export controls.
≤75K H200s is nothing for the likes of Alibaba, and anyway this is old news (2025 news). I'll be surprised to see deliveries before Q4 2026, when it is even less relevant
The US has cleared roughly 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's H200. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD. So far not a single chip has shipped.
Until the chips actually move, the licenses work as a bargaining position rather than a finished deal. Washington keeps the H200 in reserve and can redeem it only if Beijing gives something back, on rare earths, on trade, on the tone toward Taiwan.
The staging points the same way. Huang wasn't on the original delegation list. Trump invited him and picked him up in Alaska on the way to meet Xi. The CEO of the most important chipmaker is traveling as part of the leverage, not as a guest.
The more interesting possibility is that the bottleneck sits in Beijing, not Washington. China has spent months pushing its champions toward domestic hardware, Huawei Ascend, homegrown clusters. Ordering 75,000 H200s would rebuild the same US dependency those firms are supposed to be shedding. The licenses may already be in hand while the Chinese buyers hold off on their own.
That would explain why the limbo suits both governments. US hawks don't actually want the chips in China, and Beijing wants self sufficiency. An approval that never gets redeemed looks like progress and commits no one to anything.
The number worth watching is deliveries, not approved firms. While it stays at zero, this is diplomacy dressed as commerce.
So they are basically matching the "supposed" production target of 950PR for 2026 750k H200s & 750k 950PR
≤75K H200s is nothing for the likes of Alibaba, and anyway this is old news (2025 news). I'll be surprised to see deliveries before Q4 2026, when it is even less relevant
he did NOT wake up a loser
Like most other powerful AI chips, H200s use high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is heavily supply constrained.
Because of this, every new H200 produced for China means fewer AI chips produced for US customers.
Because AI chips that would have used this HBM for US customers are more powerful on a FLOP/s basis, the compute loss for the US is asymmetric — every H200 produced for China takes away ~2x that amount of compute from other customers.
The US government realizes this trade-off, and has implemented an America-first AI compute provision. As a condition of obtaining these licenses, NVIDIA needs to have certified to BIS that the production of any new chips for China will not result in fewer chips going to US customers. I’d be pretty interested in seeing their findings!
