AI Capacity · China GPU Supply
600,000 Nvidia H200 Chips Reportedly Sit in Hong Kong as Beijing Withholds Approval
An eight-card H200 server was offered for over $900,000 in mainland China, triple last year's price.
· 2 min read
- NVDA
About 600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, a stockpile not reported before, according to Reuters.
Chips stored in Hong Kong add nothing to a Chinese capacity plan until Beijing lets them into the mainland. With official supply short, some buyers have turned to unofficial channels, and the price of an H200 server there shows what that costs.
What is getting through?
Small quantities have reached China through middlemen and roundabout routes, three people familiar with the matter said. One of the three said several major Chinese internet companies have each obtained about 10,000 H200s.
A separate report in July said Chinese officials told Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek they could buy limited quantities of the chip for training AI models, with total approvals possibly under 200,000 chips, and wanted inference to run on Chinese processors.
What does it cost?
An eight-card H200 server was offered for more than 6 million yuan, about $900,000, in mainland China by the end of October, roughly three times its price a year earlier, one person familiar said. Servers built on Nvidia’s newer Blackwell chips, which fall under US export controls, were offered for more than 20 million yuan each.
By The Denominator’s arithmetic, the Blackwell asking price is more than three times the H200 price. The newer chip carries a far higher asking price in the same market.
What does Nvidia’s filing show?
Nvidia’s latest quarterly filing describes the same squeeze. The US government licensed small H200 shipments to specific China-based customers, but Beijing restricted the sales, and Nvidia has been unable to sell all the products it is licensed to ship.
Nvidia took a $0.4 billion charge in the first half of its fiscal 2027 for excess H200 inventory and purchase obligations. Shipments under the licensing program made up less than 1% of Data Center revenue in the quarter ended July 26.
Which of a company’s Chinese capacity is priced at the unofficial server rate, and which depends on an approval Beijing has not given?
