Nvidia chips pile up in Hong Kong as China withholds import approval

Nov 5 (Reuters) - About 600,000 of Nvidia's advanced artificial intelligence chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, two people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing withholds approval for large-scale imports despite demand from technology firms.

The size of the stockpile of H200 chips, which has not previously been reported, reflects Beijing's reluctance to increase reliance on US technology. At the same time, Chinese companies need Nvidia's NVDA.O advanced computing power to meet surging AI demand in the world's second-largest economy.

China has allowed some of the chips to enter the country in recent months, three people familiar with the matter said. Several major Chinese internet companies have each obtained about 10,000 H200 chips in the past few months, one of the people said.

Three people said small quantities of chips had been shipped via intermediaries and indirect routes without specifying how many.

But Beijing has yet to approve large-volume imports into mainland China, the people said.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Nvidia or Chinese tech companies Alibaba 9988.HK, ByteDance, DeepSeek and Tencent 0700.HK .

H200 IS NOT THE MOST ADVANCED BUT VERY USEFUL

The H200 is not Nvidia's newest AI processor, but it has capabilities that Chinese alternatives have yet to match, making it useful for training AI models particularly when combined with Nvidia's software.

US export controls since 2022 have sought to restrict China's access to advanced Nvidia chips and the equipment needed to make them.

With authorised supply constrained, Chinese buyers have turned to intermediaries and indirect routes, pushing up prices in the unofficial market.

An eight-card H200 server was offered for more than 6 million yuan ($900,000) in mainland China by the end of October, about three times its price a year earlier, one person familiar with the matter said. Servers using Nvidia's newer Blackwell chips, which fall under US export controls, were offered for more than 20 million yuan apiece, the person added.

TENSION OVER TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY

The H200 chip is caught in tension over trade and technology more broadly between Washington and Beijing.

The United States barred exports of the H200 to China before President Donald Trump's administration gave Nvidia permission last year to sell the chips to approved Chinese customers. The policy shift followed US-China trade negotiations.

Beijing has imposed its own constraints on H200 imports, reflecting concerns about dependence on US technology.

Technology publication, the Information, reported in July that Chinese officials had told companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek that they could receive permission to buy limited quantities of H200 chips for training AI models.

It reported that total approvals could amount to fewer than 200,000 chips and that Beijing wanted firms to prioritise Chinese processors for inference — the task of running AI models.

Reuters reported last month that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards, a less powerful export-compliant product, with a combined sticker price exceeding $35 billion.

($1 = 6.6693 Chinese yuan renminbi)