600,000 Nvidia H200 chips pile up as China holds back imports
Beijing has allowed only limited shipments despite demand from major tech companies, while unofficial prices for eight-card servers have tripled.
About 600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are sitting in Hong Kong while China withholds approval for large-scale imports, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the matter. The stockpile shows that the bottleneck for this particular chip supply has shifted to Beijing even after Washington allowed Nvidia to sell H200s to approved Chinese customers.
China has permitted some shipments in recent months. Several large internet companies have each obtained about 10,000 chips, according to Reuters, while smaller quantities have arrived through intermediaries and indirect routes. Authorities have not approved imports at the scale requested by technology companies.
The restriction reflects Beijing’s effort to reduce dependence on US technology and promote domestic processors. Yet the H200 remains useful for training large AI models because Chinese alternatives have not fully matched its capabilities or Nvidia’s software ecosystem.
Scarcity is pushing up unofficial prices. An eight-card H200 server was offered for more than 6 million yuan, or about 900,000 dollars, roughly three times its price a year earlier. Servers using newer Blackwell chips covered by US export controls were offered for more than 20 million yuan.
China’s industry ministry and economic planning agency did not comment. Nvidia, Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek and Tencent also did not respond to Reuters.
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