US Commerce officials have recently cleared ten Chinese firms—including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, Lenovo and Foxconn—to purchase NVIDIA's second‑tier H200 AI processors. Reuters says none have been shipped yet. The H200 ranks just below the flagship B200 chip but outperforms the older H20 model that Beijing received earlier. Each approved company may order up to 75,000 units.

December 2025 saw Washington lift a ban that had halted H200 exports over fears they could bolster China’s military AI. Beijing pledged to import several hundred thousand chips in January, earmarked for three unnamed internet players. The Commerce Department’s licence caps purchases at 75,000 chips per firm, but Chinese regulators urged a pause after ambiguous policy shifts in the United States.

While the H200 remains a potent accelerator for data‑center workloads, its delayed rollout limits immediate gains for Chinese AI developers. Huang has warned that export curbs erode Nvidia’s foothold in the world’s largest AI market, a point he raised during a Beijing summit attended by President Trump and Xi Jinping. For now, the chips still sit in legal limbo, with no confirmed shipments.