NVIDIA Resumes Shipments of H200 GPUs to China: Confirmation from a US Official
After months of uncertainty, the NVIDIA H200 GPUs are officially returning to China. This was confirmed by Jeffery Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security in the United States, during a congressional hearing, specifying that the authorized shipments are still "very few" compared to market demand.
According to Kessler, deliveries to China and Hong Kong are currently limited to a small number of AI accelerators released through specific export licenses. The US administration continues to evaluate each request individually, verifying compliance with national security requirements and imposing checks to ensure that products are used in accordance with the granted permissions. Not all requests receive approval; some are, in fact, rejected.
The resumption of shipments represents, however, a significant shift compared to the previous months. NVIDIA had excluded any contribution from the Chinese market in its financial forecasts, to the point that CEO Jensen Huang had urged investors not to expect revenues coming from China. The start of the first deliveries could therefore partially reopen one of the world's major hubs for AI development.
The H200 belongs to the Hopper generation and was introduced in 2023. Although it is now considered outdated compared to the more recent Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs, it continues to offer high performance for training and inference of AI models. Due to its technological age, Washington chose to allow its export again while maintaining the ban on the Blackwell platforms, which are considered strategically more sensitive.
The path of Hopper in China has been particularly complex. Following the introduction of US restrictions, NVIDIA had developed the H20, a variant compliant with the export limits imposed on the Chinese market. Although characterized by reduced technical specifications compared to models intended for the rest of the world, the H20 had recorded high demand due to its superior performance compared to many local solutions.
However, this product eventually also fell under the US blockade, and China, growing impatient, began to favor the adoption of internally developed accelerators, leading NVIDIA to halt its production intended for that market. The arrival of Trump, however, shuffled the cards, and the US green-lighted the marketing of H200, albeit with restrictions. Until now, it has been China that kept the doors closed.
In the meantime, Hopper GPUs have continued to reach Beijing primarily through parallel channels and smuggling operations (an issue that is being sought a solution for). The reopening of official exports would therefore allow major Chinese companies to procure again through authorized channels.
According to rumors, about ten large Chinese tech groups, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, and DeepSeek, could be among the recipients of the first supplies. Initial estimates spoke of a cap of about 75,000 H200 GPUs available for purchase, while more recent estimates suggest that the overall volume could reach up to 200,000 units, although there is currently no official confirmation on the quantities actually authorized.
For NVIDIA, this is a limited but potentially important return. The company still cannot market the most modern Blackwell GPUs in China while continuing the development of the new Vera Rubin platform, set to debut during the year. The future Vera CPUs, at least under the current regulatory framework, are not subject to the same restrictions imposed on graphics accelerators, thus offering NVIDIA an additional channel for access to the Chinese market in an ever-evolving context.