NVIDIA is reportedly seeing major demand for its last-gen Hopper H200 AI GPUs in China after the lifting of the ban by the US Government.
NVIDIA Reportedly Sees Massive Demand For Its Hopper-Based H200 AI GPUs In China
In a report by Reuters, it is stated that NVIDIA's H200 AI GPUs are witnessing massive demand in China. The report comes days after the US Government lifted the ban on sales of older Hopper-based GPUs to China, while still keeping the ban on current-gen products such as Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra.
As per the new sales agreement, NVIDIA will be paying 25% of each sale to the United States of America, which means that NVIDIA will either have to lower its margins on Hopper sales or impose a price hike for the Chinese markets.
Earlier, it was reported that China would probably ignore the Hopper H200 AI GPUs and instead focus on domestically produced technologies for AI purposes, but it doesn't seem to be the case. As per the report, the demand for these GPUs is so strong that NVIDIA is now considering opening up further production lines through its partners to ensure a smooth supply.
Demand for the chip from Chinese companies is so strong that Nvidia is leaning toward adding new capacity, one of the sources said. They declined to be named as the discussions are private.
"We are managing our supply chain to ensure that licensed sales of the H200 to authorized customers in China will have no impact on our ability to supply customers in the United States," an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters after the story was published.
This extra capacity will help NVIDIA not disrupt the supply chain, leading to minimal or zero impact on existing AI GPU orders for its customers in the United States. NVIDIA is already ramping up production of its Blackwell Ultra GPUs, with Rubin planned to go into production next year.
But demand and sales are two different things. While demand is said to be high for the procurement of NVIDIA's H200 AI GPUs, China has yet to finalize the sale of this chip in the domestic market. It is said that the Chinese authorities have called in meetings next week to finalize whether H200 will be sold or not in China.
The NVIDIA Hopper H200 AI GPU, despite being an older chip, is still highly competitive in the Chinese domestic segment, and one that has a strong software suite backing it up. It has seen a lot of hardware and software-level optimizations that further improved its AI capabilities, and while it isn't as good as Blackwell, it's still a very desirable chip for those who don't have access to Blackwell or small/medium-tier AI sectors.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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