First Nvidia H200 shipments reach China

ByteDance and Tencent each took delivery of roughly 10,000 Nvidia H200 chips, according to a Financial Times report carried by Tom’s Hardware and other outlets — the first meaningful movement of the chips into mainland China since the US Commerce Department codified a licensing framework for H200 exports in January 2026.

The gap between policy and delivery ran to roughly seven months. The January rule itself set no per-customer unit limit; it was not until May that Commerce cleared around ten Chinese firms — including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and JD.com — to buy H200 chips, capping each at 75,000 units. Even then deliveries barely moved: Nvidia reportedly halted China-bound H200 production in March, and Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler told a congressional hearing in July that shipments so far were “trivial.” The roughly 10,000-chip shipments each company had received by mid-August therefore represented only about 13% of their licensed ceiling, prompting coverage to frame the delay itself — not the original US approval — as the binding constraint.

Reporting attributed that continued gap to restrictions on the Chinese side: Beijing was said to have instructed the two companies to hold the bulk of their US-licensed allotments in Hong Kong rather than bring them onto the mainland, a step read as protecting the market position of domestic chipmakers such as Huawei while the wider question of how far China should rely on Nvidia hardware for AI training remained unresolved within the government. The shipments confirmed that the January licensing regime had begun to function in practice rather than remaining unused paperwork, but the volume and the Hong Kong routing left China’s near-term compute access from the deal still well short of what the headline licence ceiling implied.