Tech & AI
About 600,000 Nvidia H200 Chips Sit in Hong Kong as Beijing Withholds Import Approval, Reuters Reports
Reuters says China has not cleared large-scale imports of the processors, preferring that its tech giants use domestic chips.
HedgeWeekly Tech & AI Desk ·
About 600,000 of Nvidia's H200 artificial-intelligence processors are being held in Hong Kong because Beijing has not approved large-scale imports into mainland China, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia and the relevant Chinese ministries did not respond to the news agency's requests for comment.
According to the report, Beijing wants internet groups such as Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek to run their AI workloads, particularly inference (answering user queries rather than training models), on Chinese-made chips. Total approvals for foreign chips could come to under 200,000 units, Reuters said, and several large Chinese platforms have each received about 10,000 H200s in recent months. The US allowed limited H200 sales in December 2025 and began case-by-case export licensing in January.
Scarcity is showing up in prices. By the end of October an eight-chip H200 server was offered on China's unofficial market for more than 6 million yuan, about three times a year earlier, while servers built on Nvidia's Blackwell chips, which the US bars from sale to China, were offered above 20 million yuan each. In its latest quarterly filing Nvidia said H200 sales to China were below 1% of its data-centre revenue and that it took a $400 million charge for unsold H200 stock and purchase commitments.
Why it matters: China is a small part of Nvidia's current revenue, so the direct earnings effect is limited, but the stockpile and the write-down show that licences from Washington do not guarantee sales if Beijing blocks the other end. Investors should watch whether approvals widen beyond the 200,000 mark, further inventory charges, and how quickly Chinese domestic accelerators absorb demand. The report rests on unnamed sources and has not been confirmed by either government.