From Ban To Fee: NVIDIA May Ship 80,000 H200 AI Chips To China By Lunar New Year
NVIDIA is not only hoping to finally begin shipping previously-banned H200 AI chips to China in the very near future, it's expecting to start fulfilling orders in mid-February just before the Lunar New Year, according to Reuters. Citing multiple people who are purportedly familiar with the matter, the site reports NVIDIA expects to ship 5,000 to 10,000 chip modules.
If so, that would represent 40,000 to 80,000 H200 AI chips based on NVIDIA's previous generation Hopper architecture. Whether China decides to play ball with NVIDIA's older tech remains to be seen, but at least on the U.S. side, the pieces are in place to resume shipments after they were halted due to a chip export ban under the Biden administration.
There have been a few plot twits in getting to this point. Back in August, it was reported that AMD and NVIDIA both struck a deal to pay the U.S. government 15% of AI chip shipment revenue, which would apply to AMD's Instinct MI308 accelerators and NVIDIA's Hopper H200 silicon. Then earlier this month. U.S. President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that NVIDIA will actually pay a 25% rate "to support American jobs, strengthen U.S. manufacturing, and benefit American taxpayers."
Getting U.S. government approval took some time. On more than one occasion, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang criticized the export ban and voiced concern about the impact it would have on China's ability to be more self-sufficient in the AI chip race.
From Huang's standpoint, export restrictions run counter to the U.S. remaining competitive in the AI chip race, which includes "winning developers worldwide." During a recent interview with CNBC, he warned that "China is nanoseconds behind America in AI."
"Export restrictions spurred China’s innovation. The U.S. has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips. Assumption was always questionable. Now it’s clearly wrong," Huang said.
It's now a moot point in terms of export restrictions, with the U.S. government lifting the ban on NVIDIA's last-gen AI hardware in exchange for a 25% cut of sales, while maintaining on ban on more powerful Blackwell chips. Now the question is, will China embrace the older chips?
According to the report, while NVIDIA is telling clients in China that it anticipates shipping Hopper chips in February, Beijing has not yet approved any such plan. As such, it's possible that the time frame could shift.
"The whole plan is contingent on government approval," a source told Reuters. "Nothing is certain until we get the official go-ahead."
Beyond the initial flurry of planned shipments, it's also said that NVIDIA has told Chinese partners it will add new production capacity for another wave of orders, which it's planning for the second quarter of 2026.
