About 600,000 Nvidia H200 Chips Sit in Hong Kong as Beijing Withholds Import Approval

The stockpile shows that US export permission is no longer the only barrier between Nvidia and its Chinese customers. Washington allowed limited H200 sales to China, but Beijing has kept most of the chips out of the mainland as it tries to reduce its dependence on American technology. The result is a large inventory of licensed hardware that Nvidia cannot sell where demand is strongest.

Chinese technology companies still want the H200 to train and run large AI models, even though it is not Nvidia's newest product. According to the report, Beijing wants groups such as Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek to use Chinese-made processors instead, especially for inference, the work of running models once they are trained.

Some chips are getting through. One of the people said several large Chinese internet companies had each obtained about 10,000 H200s in recent months, and three people said small quantities had also arrived through intermediaries and other indirect routes. The total number Beijing approves could end up below 200,000 chips. The Information reported in July that officials had told Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek they could buy limited quantities of H200s for training, possibly fewer than 200,000 in total.

The Approval Gap

The H200's route to China has been complicated. President Donald Trump allowed limited sales to approved Chinese customers in December 2025, after earlier US rules had barred the chip. In January, US authorities began reviewing export licences case by case, and later that month Beijing approved a first batch of imports for ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. Since then, Chinese restrictions have stopped Nvidia from shipping all the chips it is licensed to sell.

Tight supply has pushed up prices on China's unofficial market. By the end of October, a server with eight H200s was offered for more than 6 million yuan, about $900,000 and roughly three times its price a year earlier, according to the report. Servers built on Nvidia's Blackwell chips, which the US does not allow to be sold to China, were offered for more than 20 million yuan each.

What It Costs Nvidia

Nvidia has played down how much China now contributes. In its latest quarterly filing, the company said H200 sales to China were less than 1% of its data centre revenue, and it took a $400 million charge for unsold H200 inventory and purchase commitments.

Chinese buyers have not stopped ordering other Nvidia products. Reuters reported last month that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million RTX Pro graphics cards, worth more than $35 billion in total.

Nvidia, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission did not respond to requests for comment, according to the reports, and neither did Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek or Tencent. The 600,000 figure rests on unnamed sources and has not been confirmed by Nvidia or Chinese officials.

The report adds to pressure on chip stocks this week. Shares of Nvidia, AMD and Intel fell sharply on Thursday as investors priced in tighter US rules on data centres after the midterm elections. Whether Beijing releases more of the Hong Kong stockpile, or keeps steering its companies towards domestic processors, will decide whether Nvidia can recover any of the inventory behind that $400 million charge.