Nvidia AI chips pile up in Hong Kong as Beijing stalls

About 600,000 of Nvidia's ↘ 9.26% H200 artificial intelligence chips are sitting in Hong Kong waiting to be shipped to mainland China, because Beijing has not approved large-scale imports, Reuters reported on Nov. 5, citing two people familiar with the matter. Reuters said the size of the stockpile had not been reported before. In its view, the stockpile shows Beijing is reluctant to lean more on US technology, even though Chinese companies need Nvidia's computing power to keep up with rising AI demand.reuters.com

The standoff reverses the usual pattern in the chip dispute. Washington has cleared sales of the H200 to approved Chinese buyers. Now the holdup is on Beijing's side.

Limited shipments so far

China has let some of the chips in over recent months, three people told Reuters. One said several major Chinese internet companies had each received about 10,000 H200s. Small, unspecified quantities have also arrived through intermediaries and indirect routes. Large-volume imports, however, still have no approval. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, its National Development and Reform Commission, Nvidia, Alibaba ↗ 2.64%, ByteDance, DeepSeek and Tencent did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment.reuters.com

With authorized supply limited, prices on the unofficial market have climbed. By the end of October, an eight-card H200 server was being offered in mainland China for more than 6 million yuan (about $900,000), roughly three times its price a year earlier, one person told Reuters. Servers built on Nvidia's newer Blackwell chips, which remain under US export controls, were offered for more than 20 million yuan each.reuters.com

Washington opened, Beijing held back

The US had barred H200 exports to China until the Trump administration allowed Nvidia to sell the chips to approved Chinese customers last year, after US-China trade talks, Reuters noted. The H200 is not Nvidia's newest processor, but Chinese alternatives still can't match it, especially for training AI models. In July, The Information reported that Beijing might approve fewer than 200,000 H200s in total and wanted companies to use Chinese processors for inference, meaning the work of running AI models.reuters.com

Demand shifts to other chips

Chinese buyers are also turning to Nvidia's less powerful RTX Pro 5500, which complies with US export rules. Bloomberg reporting carried by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said Chinese AI and cloud companies had ordered about 6 million of these chips. They expect to receive only about 1% of that within four months, because Nvidia's production capacity is tight. An Nvidia spokesperson told Bloomberg that US firms "continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated U.S. export controls… and China's own limits on U.S. imports."arkansasonline.com