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A large shipment of NVIDIA's powerful AI chips is facing an unexpected delay before reaching China. About 600,000 NVIDIA H200 AI chips are sitting in Hong Kong. Chinese tech firms want them badly, but Beijing has not cleared large imports, people familiar with the matter say.
Some chips have got through. Over recent months, China let in small amounts. Several big internet firms reportedly received about 10,000 chips each. Small lots also came in through middlemen. But bulk imports still have no approval.
China's industry ministry and planning body did not reply to requests for comment. NVIDIA, Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek, and Tencent did not respond right away either.
The H200 is not NVIDIA's newest chip. Even so, Chinese-made chips cannot match it yet. NVIDIA's software also works well with it, which helps firms train large AI models.
The US limited China's access to top NVIDIA chips and chip-making tools in 2022. After trade talks, Washington later let approved Chinese buyers purchase the H200. But Beijing set its own limits on imports.
The short supply has pushed up prices on the unofficial market. By the end of October, an eight-card H200 server cost over 6 million yuan, about USD 900,000. That is nearly three times the price a year ago. Servers with NVIDIA's newer Blackwell chips cost more than 20 million yuan.
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China seems to be weighing two goals. It needs more computing power for AI. It also wants to rely less on foreign chips. Officials reportedly want tech firms to use Chinese chips for inference, which means running AI models that are already trained.
Meanwhile, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have ordered over three million NVIDIA RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards. The order is worth more than USD 35 billion. These chips are weaker, but they follow US export rules.
The pile in Hong Kong shows how uncertain NVIDIA's future in China is. Both countries want to lead in tech, and each has its own aims at home. Until Beijing decides, the chips will stay where they are.