~600,000 Nvidia H200 Chips Stuck in Hong Kong as China Delays Approval for Large-Scale Imports
nashnova research
Some 600,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips are warehoused in Hong Kong awaiting entry into mainland China, but Beijing has approved only small batches so far — leaving China's AI compute supply squeezed from both sides of the Pacific.
600,000 chips in Hong Kong — what is going on?
Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reports that roughly 600,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips are stored in Hong Kong, waiting to ship to the mainland. The stockpile has not been previously reported.
The H200 is not Nvidia's latest generation, but it still significantly outperforms China's domestic alternatives — especially when paired with Nvidia's software stack for AI training.
This means → Chinese firms have the chips within arm's reach; the bottleneck is not supply but Beijing's approval gate.
Why has Beijing released only a small batch?
In recent months, China has let a small number of H200 chips through — several major internet companies each received roughly 10,000 units.
Additional chips entered via middlemen and indirect channels, though exact volumes were not disclosed.
The Information reported in July that Beijing told Alibaba, ByteDance, and DeepSeek they could purchase limited H200 quantities — possibly fewer than 200,000 in total — and required them to use domestic processors for inference workloads.
In plain terms = Beijing's stance is "Nvidia for training, domestic chips for inference" — neither a full blockade nor an open door.
With official channels tight, how high have prices climbed?
U.S. export controls, in place since 2022, restrict China's access to advanced Nvidia chips. As official supply tightened, buyers turned to middlemen.
By late October, an eight-GPU H200 server was quoted at over RMB 6 million (about $900,000) on the mainland — roughly three times the price a year earlier.
Servers using Nvidia's newer Blackwell chips — also covered by U.S. export controls — were quoted above RMB 20 million.
This reflects a widening grey-market premium: the tighter the official channel, the steeper the cost of compute for Chinese firms.
Why does this stockpile's fate matter?
ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have separately ordered over 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 GPUs — a lower-tier, export-compliant product — at a combined list price exceeding $35 billion.
This means → Chinese firms are running two tracks at once: stockpiling high-end chips pending approval while bulk-buying compliant lower-end cards as a fallback.
Whether the 600,000 H200s clear customs at scale will be a key signal for the trajectory of the U.S.–China tech standoff.
市场有风险，内容仅供研究参考，不构成投资建议。