About 600,000 of Nvidia's H200 chips are sitting in Hong Kong waiting to be shipped into mainland China, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters. The size of that stockpile had not previously been reported, and it is the clearest physical measure of a standoff: Chinese companies need the compute, Beijing does not want to deepen its dependence on American technology, and the hardware is parked in between.
The obstacle is no longer Washington. The United States barred H200 exports to China, then, after trade negotiations, allowed Nvidia last year to sell the chips to approved Chinese customers. But Beijing has not approved large-volume imports. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Nvidia, Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek or Tencent.
Some have got through. Several major Chinese internet companies have each received about 10,000 H200 chips over the past few months, one source said, and small quantities have been shipped via intermediaries and indirect routes — the volume was not specified. Large-volume approvals do not exist.
The H200 is not Nvidia's newest accelerator, but it does things Chinese alternatives cannot yet match, particularly for training models and particularly in combination with Nvidia's software. That gap sets a grey-market price. An eight-card H200 server was offered for more than six million yuan, about $900,000, in mainland China at the end of October — roughly three times what it cost a year earlier. Servers using the newer Blackwell chips, which are also covered by US export controls, were offered at more than 20 million yuan each.
The direction of Chinese policy has been visible since the summer. The Information reported in July that officials had told companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek that they could receive permission to buy limited quantities of H200s for training, with total approvals possibly amounting to fewer than 200,000 chips, and that Beijing wanted domestic processors prioritised for inference — the job of running models rather than building them.
Meanwhile the same companies are buying what needs no special permit. Reuters reported last month that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than three million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 cards, a weaker but export-compliant product, with a combined sticker price above $35 billion.
What the 600,000 figure does not prove is demand. It proves tied-up capital. Someone is financing warehousing and intermediaries while the official channel stays shut, and the grey-market price indicates how expensive that wait has become for the buyers — and how much leverage Beijing holds by simply not signing.
