Earlier this month, Chinese customs authorities explicitly told agents that H200 chips were not permitted to enter the country. This created an unusual policy situation where older A100 and H100 models remained under U.S. export controls, while the newer H200 did not.

Import Approvals and Volume

According to the Financial Times, other Chinese companies could soon receive H200 shipments of similar sizes. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent eventually received approval from Beijing to purchase more than 400,000 H200 chips in total. DeepSeek and JD.com are also among the roughly 10 Chinese technology firms that received permission to buy the processors.

Demand continues to surge as these companies place orders for more than two million H200 chips, far exceeding Nvidia's available inventory. Very limited quantities of the H200 are currently in production, as the American chipmaker has shifted its focus to its advanced Blackwell and Rubin lines.

Under U.S. licensing terms, buyers are permitted to purchase directly from Nvidia or through approved distributors like Lenovo and Foxconn. Each approved customer is allowed to buy up to 75,000 chips. Lenovo confirmed in a recent statement that it is "one of several companies approved to sell H200 in China as part of Nvidia's export license".

Before finalizing these approvals, Chinese regulators gathered representatives from Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent to formally assess their demand for the hardware.

Geopolitical Balancing Act

The U.S. government previously banned H200 sales to China due to military development concerns. In December 2025, the U.S. allowed Nvidia to sell the processors to vetted Chinese companies in exchange for a 25 percent tariff on those sales. By the time of this approval, the H200 was already two years old.

The H200 is Nvidia's second most powerful AI chip, surpassed only by the B200, and is roughly six times more powerful than the older H20 model. Before export curbs tightened, Nvidia commanded about 95 percent of China's advanced chip market. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang previously estimated the country's AI market alone would be worth $50 billion this year.

Authorities want to encourage sales of locally manufactured AI chips from companies like Huawei and Cambricon. As a result, China reportedly wants companies to keep most of their Nvidia chips out of the mainland to support local chipmakers. The Chinese government has recently barred government-funded data centers from purchasing Nvidia's AI chips to further promote domestic alternatives.

Chinese companies anticipate that authorities may need to review future purchase requests and require firms to provide specific use cases. In the past, Chinese authorities even discussed a proposal requiring each H200 purchase to be bundled with a set ratio of domestic chips. "Beijing's approval of the H200 is driven by purely strategic motives," Alex Capri, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore's business school, told the South China Morning Post.