"The Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they’re trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry," Lutnick said. "We have not sold them chips as of yet." Lutnick made the same statement in late February during a House hearing, when asked about the status of H200 sales. However, Nvidia claimed that it already received orders and export licenses for multiple Chinese customers at GTC 2026 last month. These conflicting statements make the current situation unclear — especially as it’s also been reported that AI chip exports are bottlenecked at the Bureau of Industry and Security , where undersecretary Jeffrey Kessler has reportedly been personally reviewing each individual application .
The U.S. is finally allowing Nvidia to export its chips to China again, with a 25% fee, and many major Chinese firms such as Alibaba and ByteDance were reportedly ready to order hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's AI GPUs. However, Beijing has called for its customs officials to block H200 imports and has essentially only allowed universities and R&D labs to acquire them. This is not surprising, as China has been pushing domestic companies to purchase locally-manufactured chips from Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu, Cambricon, Moore Threads, and others. This is unwelcome news for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, as the company’s market share in China has fallen to under 60% — a big drop from the 95% share it had before the sanctions. Huang got into a heated discussion during a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, disagreeing with a total ban of AI chip exports to China and reiterating that the the U.S. government should not let Chinese AI chips dominate over U.S. manufacturers just to make it harder for Chinese researchers to build their own AI models on the U.S. tech stack. Despite the limitations and uncertainties, demand for H200 chips is still high in China — even though it’s behind the company’s latest Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin AI GPUs. It has gotten to the point that some firms are considering purchasing them on the black market.
You may like Nvidia still hasn’t sold a single H200 to China nearly three months after getting the green light from the White House Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says China hasn't approved H200 imports yet Jensen says Nvidia has received orders from Chinese customers for H200 GPUs, licenses from US gov't — H200 manufacturing restarting
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/u-s-commerce-secretary-says-nvidia-still-hasnt-sold-any-h200-ai-gpus-to-china-chinese-government-is-blocking-imports-in-an-attempt-to-push-domestic-semiconductor-industry#main
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