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

The stockpile shows that the biggest obstacle to Nvidia's data centre business in China is now in Beijing, not Washington. The US barred sales of the H200 to China until the Trump administration allowed them to approved Chinese customers last year. Chinese authorities then imposed their own limits, which Reuters said reflect concern about the country's reliance on US technology. The result is a large volume of chips sitting next door to Nvidia's customers that cannot legally reach them in bulk.

Very little has got through so far. Several of China's biggest internet companies have each received about 10,000 H200 chips in recent months, according to the report, and small quantities have entered the mainland through intermediaries. Beijing has yet to approve large-volume imports, the people told Reuters.

The shortage shows up in prices. By the end of October, an eight-card H200 server was being offered in mainland China for more than 6 million yuan, or about $900,000, roughly three times its price a year earlier, Reuters reported. Servers built on Nvidia's newer Blackwell chips, which remain under US export controls, were being offered for more than 20 million yuan each.

The H200 belongs to Nvidia's Hopper generation, which came before Blackwell, so it is not the company's most advanced processor. Even so, it is far more capable than anything Chinese buyers can legally obtain in volume, which helps explain why prices have climbed while approvals have stalled.

Beijing has signalled before that it wants to keep these purchases small. The Information reported in July that approvals could total fewer than 200,000 chips and that the government wanted companies to prioritise domestic processors for running AI models. If that ceiling holds, most of the chips stored in Hong Kong would have nowhere to go on the mainland.

Chinese companies are still spending heavily on Nvidia hardware that falls within US rules. Reuters also reported that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have together ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 cards, a less powerful product designed to comply with export controls, at a combined list price of more than $35 billion.

The report did not say who owns the chips held in Hong Kong. Nvidia, the Chinese companies named in the report, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment. Whether Beijing grants wider approvals will decide whether the stockpile turns into revenue for Nvidia or remains in storage.