NVIDIA's H200 AI GPUs are finally shipping to China, as reported by U.S. officials, marking the return of the banned chip.
China Softens Its Position on NVIDIA GPUs As First H200 Shipments Now Headed To Chinese AI Firms
The NVIDIA Hopper story in China has been a roller coaster ride so far. When Hopper was launched, US export restrictions for the Chinese market were in full swing.
These pushed NVIDIA to release an export-compliant variant called the H20 for China, which ended up being severely cut down, but still a viable option against what China's domestic chipmakers had to offer. Despite seeing a surge in demand, China went on a crackdown on H20, to focus on domestic offerings. The move further prompted NVIDIA to halt production of H20 for China.
Hopper GPUs did continue to see sales in China, but only through black market and smuggling channels. This continues to be the case to this very day. With the ongoing Blackwell bans, the US Government decided it would open up sales of the now two-generation-old Hopper GPUs to China, somewhat softening its stance on AI export sales to China.
Blackwell is still locked out for sales in China, but during the Trump-Xi meeting back in May, where Jensen Huang was also part of the tech CEOs' lineup accompanying President Donald J Trump, we saw that H200s were being opened up to top Chinese AI firms. A total of 10 firms would be part of these upcoming deliveries, which would allow them to purchase up to 75,000 H200 chips.
These firms included the likes of Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD, DeepSeek & others. The most recent claim is that these firms will be allowed to buy 200,000 H200 GPUs.
H200 Back In China, Where NVIDIA Officially Maintains a 0% Market Share In AI
Now, according to Walter Bloomberg, a Senior U.S. official has confirmed that the first NVIDIA H200 AI GPU shipments have commenced and are on their way to China. These chips will be landing at the Chinese and Hong Kong ports. Although the exact number of deliveries isn't reported, it is stated that the amount remains "very few" versus the actual demand.
Even these "very few" shipments would be able to improve NVIDIA's current position in China from a 0% "official" market share, as stated by CEO Jensen.
The NVIDIA H200 AI GPUs were first released in 2023, and since then, NVIDIA has launched its Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs.
The AI giant will be releasing its brand-new Vera Rubin platform featuring Rubin GPUs this year, with volume production already underway. NVIDIA is going to be shipping Vera CPUs to Chinese firms since there are no restrictions on CPUs (yet), but the race to Agentic AI is rapidly shifting the market landscape from GPUs to CPUs.
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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