With the sales ban lifted, Chinese tech giants, including ByteDance, are scrambling to secure orders for Nvidia’s H200 graphics accelerators while they can. But will there be enough to satisfy demand?
Citing multiple sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reports Chinese companies have placed orders for more than 2 million of the chips. That’s up from the 40,000 to 80,000 initial orders reported last week.
But with just 700,000 of the now two-year-old AI accelerators in stock, Nvidia has reportedly approached TSMC to ramp production of the chips. The H200 uses TSMC’s 4N process, a slightly older version of technology used by its higher-performance Blackwell parts (4NP), which remain unavailable in China.
Nvidia doesn’t anticipate sales of H200s in China will have any impact on chip supplies to US customers.
“Offering the H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance,” a company spokesperson told The Register and other outlets. “China is a highly competitive market with rapidly growing local chip suppliers. Blocking all U.S. exports undercut our national and economic security and only benefited foreign competition.”
Shipments of the newly minted chips are expected to begin in the second half of 2026 with 8-GPU systems said to sell for around 1.5 million yuan (about $215,000).
Despite its advancing age, the H200 is the most powerful GPU Nvidia can sell in China. Biden-era export controls had capped the performance of chips sold in the Middle Kingdom, but earlier this month, the Trump administration made an exception for H200 shipments if Nvidia agreed to cut Uncle Sam in on 25 percent of the revenues.
Compared to Nvidia’s H20 — a cut-down version of the H200 built to comply with US export controls — that extra zero translates into a pretty big performance jump, particularly for compute-intensive AI training workloads.
The H200 offers 6x faster floating point performance, 50 percent more HBM3e and 20 percent higher memory bandwidth.
ByteDance is apparently one of several Chinese hyperscalers lining up for the chips. According to the South China Morning Post, the TikTok parent plans to buy roughly $14 billion worth of H200s.
However, there is no guarantee that those chips will ever make it to mainland China. While the US government has signed off on H200 sales to China, Beijing has not.
In response to US trade policies governing AI chip and semiconductor equipment sales, Chinese authorities have begun pressuring hyperscalers in the region to ditch Nvidia for domestic alternatives.
The nation has also moved to block state-funded datacenters from using foreign AI chips, while warning of potential backdoors or remote kill switches — allegations Nvidia has fervently denied. ®
