China has agreed to import its first batch of NVIDIA’s H200 AI chips after the government initially rejected the idea, Reuters reported. Several hundred thousand H200 chips were approved for sale in the country following NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang’s visit there last week, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The US government allowed the sale of NVIDIA’s H200 processors to vetted and approved companies in China late last year. The first sales have been allocated mainly to three unnamed Chinese internet companies and the government is accepting applications for future approvals, according to the sources.
NVIDIA’s most powerful AI chip, the Blackwell B200, is still restricted for export to China. Despite that, over $1 billion worth of those and other high-end NVIDIA chips made their way to China via black market sales, according to previous reports.
The H200 is NVIDIA’s second most powerful AI GPU behind the B200, which is reportedly 10 times faster for some jobs. However, the H200 is still far more capable than NVIDIA’s H20, which was the only chip approved for export to China prior to the Trump administration’s H200 approval in December. Initially, China’s government rejected that chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors.
China is trying to become self-reliant for its AI chips and infrastructure, with Huawei currently offering the best processors domestically. However, AI chip experts have said NVIDIA’s tech is still far ahead of anything that Huawei or other Chinese companies can currently produce.
