About 600,000 of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips are being stored in Hong Kong because Beijing has not approved large-scale imports into mainland China, Reuters reported. The news agency cited two people familiar with the matter.
Nvidia did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment, and neither did China’s industry ministry or its main economic planning agency.
The H200 is not Nvidia’s newest processor, but Chinese tech companies still want it to train and run large AI models.
However, Beijing wants firms such as Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek to use Chinese-made chips instead, according to Reuters. That applies especially to inference, the work of running models once they are trained.
As a result, the total number of foreign chips China approves could end up below 200,000, Reuters reported. Several large Chinese internet companies have each received about 10,000 H200s in recent months, one of its sources said.
The shortage has pushed up prices on China’s unofficial market. By the end of October, a server with eight H200 chips was being offered there for more than 6m yuan, about three times its price a year earlier.
Servers with Nvidia’s newer Blackwell chips, which the US does not allow to be sold to China, were offered for more than 20m yuan each.
The deadlock follows months of shifting rules on both sides of the chip export fight . In January, the US began reviewing H200 export licences for China case by case, after President Donald Trump allowed limited sales in December 2025.
Later that month, Beijing approved a first batch of H200 imports for ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. Since then, however, Chinese restrictions have kept Nvidia from selling all of the chips it is licensed to ship.
In its latest quarterly filing, Nvidia said H200 sales to China came to less than 1% of its data centre revenue. It also took a $400m charge for unsold H200 stock and purchase commitments.
Demand for other Nvidia products remains strong, though. Last month, Reuters reported that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million RTX Pro graphics cards, worth more than $35bn in total.
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