US approves Nvidia H200 chip sales to ten Chinese firms
The US government approved Nvidia H200 AI chip sales to roughly ten Chinese companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and JD.com. Lenovo and Foxconn received clearance to distribute the chips inside China. No shipments have occurred yet with deliveries expected no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2026. The approvals cover about 750,000 units and represent a limited easing of prior export controls.
≤75K H200s is nothing for the likes of Alibaba, and anyway this is old news (2025 news). I'll be surprised to see deliveries before Q4 2026, when it is even less relevant
this is a pretty accurate assessment for my part I think that Xi is correct about the primacy of indigenous development, but wrong on the implicit timelines. The optimal move for China would be to import a lot of compute now, and try hard to not let it smother domestic chips.
In this sense, as in many other, DeepSeek to the rescue they can get supported via domestic semiconductor funds, while lesser companies (ie Tencent) can buy H200s to produce slop (and immediate economic value) I think China will realize this is their best move soon
Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞)@teortaxesTexthis is a pretty accurate assessment for my part I think that Xi is correct about the primacy of indigenous development, but wrong on the implicit timelines. The optimal move for China would be to import a lot of compute now, and try hard to not let it smother domestic chips.
#1265Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀@PETERWILDEFORDI'm here monitoring the situation with @MTSlive:
- What's up with NVIDIA and chip smuggling? - What's up with the hantavirus? - What's up with AI? - How do you do top forecasting?
MTS@MTSliveSITUATION ANALYSIS: NVIDIA officially reports zero China compute revenue following US export bans on advanced AI chips. But Chinese AI labs continue to train frontier models, raising questions about where the compute is actually coming from. @peterwildeford argues that hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA chips are being smuggled into China through shell companies in Malaysia and Singapore, and that DeepSeek's models are rumored to be trained on this illicit supply. "NVIDIA might have zero official China revenue, but their chips are still in high demand." "A company in Malaysia or Singapore legally buys chips from NVIDIA and stocks them in a data center. NVIDIA inspects, says 'yep, there's the data center,' and leaves. Then the company disassembles it, packages it up, and ships it into China under a shell company." "The DOJ has documented hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA chips being illegally used in China today." "It's rumored DeepSeek's model is trained on a lot of these smuggled chips."
#1479Zephyr@ZEPHYR_Z9So they are basically matching the "supposed" production target of 950PR for 2026 750k H200s & 750k 950PR
Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞)@teortaxesTex≤75K H200s is nothing for the likes of Alibaba, and anyway this is old news (2025 news). I'll be surprised to see deliveries before Q4 2026, when it is even less relevant
#1494Chubby♨️@KIMMONISMUSThe US has cleared roughly 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's H200. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD. So far not a single chip has shipped.
Until the chips actually move, the licenses work as a bargaining position rather than a finished deal. Washington keeps the H200 in reserve and can redeem it only if Beijing gives something back, on rare earths, on trade, on the tone toward Taiwan.
The staging points the same way. Huang wasn't on the original delegation list. Trump invited him and picked him up in Alaska on the way to meet Xi. The CEO of the most important chipmaker is traveling as part of the leverage, not as a guest.
The more interesting possibility is that the bottleneck sits in Beijing, not Washington. China has spent months pushing its champions toward domestic hardware, Huawei Ascend, homegrown clusters. Ordering 75,000 H200s would rebuild the same US dependency those firms are supposed to be shedding. The licenses may already be in hand while the Chinese buyers hold off on their own.
That would explain why the limbo suits both governments. US hawks don't actually want the chips in China, and Beijing wants self sufficiency. An approval that never gets redeemed looks like progress and commits no one to anything.
The number worth watching is deliveries, not approved firms. While it stays at zero, this is diplomacy dressed as commerce.
