About 600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are sitting in Hong Kong, bought and paid for but unable to cross into mainland China, according to a Reuters report that several outlets carried this week. Beijing has been slow to approve large-scale imports, and the result is one of the odder standoffs of the chip war: some of the most sought-after hardware on the planet, idle in a warehouse within sight of the market that wants it.
The reluctance appears to be deliberate. Reuters reported that Chinese regulators want companies such as Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek to lean on domestic chips instead, especially for inference, the work of running models after they have been trained. On that reading, the pile-up is policy rather than paperwork.
A trickle, not a flood
Some chips have made it through. Reuters reported that several large Chinese internet firms have each obtained roughly 10,000 H200s over recent months, but regulators told them to leave most of the hardware in Hong Kong, which lacks the data-center capacity to run much of it anyway. The total number of foreign chips China ultimately waves through could land below 200,000, well short of what is stranded.
Scarcity has done what scarcity does. By the end of October, one person familiar with the matter said an eight-card H200 server was being offered for more than 6 million yuan, around $900,000, on the mainland. That is roughly three times the price of a year earlier.
Both sides pulling the same chips in
The freeze is the mirror image of the pressure coming from Washington. The United States began reviewing H200 export licenses for China case by case in January, after the Trump administration allowed limited sales late in 2025. Now Beijing is adding its own brake from the other direction. A Chinese firm that wants these chips has to clear an American license and then a Chinese import approval, and right now the second gate is mostly shut.
For Nvidia, the timing is awkward. The company has spent the year trying to hold its China revenue together while managing the rules on who its Asian partners can sell to, and it is doing so while its chief executive faces a board inquiry tied to a reported Chinese intelligence effort. The stranded inventory also lands against a jittery backdrop in Chinese tech, where an AI-driven stock boom turned sharply lower late last month.
Neither Nvidia nor the relevant Chinese ministries commented on the Reuters report. Beijing has not said when, or whether, the larger shipments will be cleared.
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