According to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters, roughly 600,000 Nvidia H200 artificial intelligence accelerators are currently waiting in Hong Kong to be shipped to mainland China. Beijing has so far not approved large-scale imports, even though Chinese technology companies need the processors for their AI development efforts.
Why is Beijing restricting imports?
The restrictions reflect strategic and political concerns: Chinese authorities are seeking to reduce dependence on U.S. technology. Reporting by The Information has indicated that Beijing might allow limited purchases of H200 units for model training, while favoring domestically produced processors for running already-trained models.
What the H200 offers and the state of Chinese alternatives
The H200 is not Nvidia's newest chip, but Chinese alternatives do not yet match all of its capabilities. Coupled with Nvidia's software ecosystem, the H200 is particularly useful for training large language models and other AI systems. In recent months several major Chinese internet companies purchased roughly 10,000 units each, and smaller shipments have entered the country via intermediaries and indirect routes.
Prices and market effects
One Reuters source said that at the end of October a server equipped with eight H200 cards was being offered in China for more than 6 million yuan (about 290 million forints), roughly three times the price of a year earlier. Servers built around newer Blackwell chips that fall under U.S. export controls were being offered at even higher prices — reportedly more than 960 million forints.
Large orders and alternative procurement
The scale of demand is underscored by orders from major firms: ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent together ordered more than 3 million lower-performance Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards that comply with U.S. export rules, with a combined list price reported to exceed 11,000 billion forints. Reuters also reports that neither the relevant Chinese authorities, Nvidia, nor the contacted technology companies responded to questions about the Hong Kong inventories or import approvals.
Stakes
Limiting access to H200 chips could slow development of large language models and other AI projects at some Chinese firms, while serving Beijing's strategic objective of reducing reliance on foreign technology. The situation highlights how global chip trade has become politically sensitive and how technology competition increasingly overlaps with national security considerations.
