Nvidia Retires the H20 and Aims the H200 at China

Nvidia's business in China has spent two years swinging between open and shut, and the latest turn is the clearest sign yet of where it is heading. The H20, the cut-down chip the company built specifically to stay inside American export rules, is reaching the end of the line. In its place Nvidia is moving to sell a version of its more capable H200 into the same market, a shift that tells you as much about policy as it does about silicon.

The H20 was always a compromise part. Nvidia designed it to sit just under the performance ceiling that Washington set for exports to China, and for a while that was enough to keep the orders flowing. Earlier this year Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, made plain that the H20 would be the last of its kind. "It's not Hopper because it's not possible to modify Hopper anymore," he said, a blunt way of admitting the older architecture had no more room to be trimmed and still sold.

From a ban to a bargain

The road here has been anything but straight. In 2025 the United States first required a licence for H20 exports, effectively freezing them, then reversed course after a meeting between Huang and President Trump, with licences promised as part of a wider negotiation that touched on rare-earth supply. By this spring Huang was telling Nvidia's GTC conference that the company had "secured a large number of export licenses for Chinese customers" and restarted production to meet the orders.

The H200 opening is the next step in that thaw. It gives Chinese buyers access to a meaningfully stronger chip than the H20, which matters for training larger models rather than just running them. For Nvidia it protects a market it had at one point written out of its own forecasts entirely.

Why the timing is awkward

The commercial logic is obvious, but the context is tense. Memory prices are climbing as AI demand outruns supply, a squeeze that has already pushed up the cost of everything from data-centre build-outs to budget phones. When a Broadcom executive warned this week about the market running hot, chip stocks fell sharply, a reminder of how jittery investors have become about the whole supply chain. China's own progress in high-bandwidth memory, the component that sits next to chips like the H200, is part of what has them worried.

That progress is also the deeper story behind Washington's shifting stance. Export controls work only while the controlled thing has no close substitute. The faster Chinese firms close the gap, the weaker the case for holding American chips back, since a ban that only pushes buyers toward a domestic alternative hands that market away for nothing. The same demand that has driven the memory shortage now stretching toward 2028 is what makes the China question so hard to answer cleanly.

Nvidia will take the sales. The policy argument over whether it should be allowed to make them is far from settled, and the H200's arrival in China guarantees it will be reopened.