Nvidia H200 Stockpile in Hong Kong Hits 600,000 Chips

About 600,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips are sitting in Hong Kong waiting to be shipped to mainland China, because Beijing still has not approved large-scale imports. Two people familiar with the matter gave the figure to Reuters on November 5, the first time the size of the Nvidia H200 Hong Kong stockpile has been reported.

The standoff is unusual: Washington now allows the sales, Chinese tech giants want the chips, and yet the hardware is stuck at the border. According to the Reuters report carried by CNA, the bottleneck is on the Chinese side, which reflects Beijing's reluctance to deepen its reliance on US technology.

How Many Nvidia H200 Chips Have Reached China So Far?

Only a trickle. Three sources said China has let some of the chips in over recent months, and one said several major Chinese internet companies have each received about 10,000 H200 units. In addition, small quantities have reportedly moved through intermediaries and indirect routes, although the sources did not say how many.

That is far below demand. The Information reported in July that Chinese officials had told Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek they could buy limited quantities of H200 chips for training AI models, with total approvals possibly under 200,000 units. Beijing also wants companies to run inference, the everyday work of answering prompts with a trained model, on domestic processors instead.

Why Does China Still Want an Older Nvidia Chip?

The H200 is not Nvidia's newest processor; the Blackwell generation has replaced it at the top of the range. Even so, Chinese alternatives have yet to match its training performance, especially when it is combined with Nvidia's CUDA software stack. As a result, prices on the unofficial market have climbed sharply.

One source said an eight-card H200 server was offered for more than 6 million yuan (about $900,000) in mainland China at the end of October, roughly three times its price a year earlier. Servers built on Blackwell chips, which remain under US export controls, were reportedly listed for more than 20 million yuan each.

What Does the Nvidia H200 Hong Kong Stockpile Mean?

For Nvidia, the pile-up is the latest sign that its China business now depends on two governments rather than one. The US barred H200 exports before the Trump administration approved sales to vetted Chinese customers, and a New York Times investigation into those H200 licenses has already raised questions about who received them.

Demand has also shifted to cheaper, export-compliant hardware. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent ordered more than 3 million RTX Pro 5500 cards last month, yet only a small share of those RTX Pro 5500 orders is expected to ship soon. Meanwhile, the political pressure in Washington keeps growing, with House chairs asking Jensen Huang for a briefing over an alleged spy link.

Neither Nvidia nor China's industry ministry or planning agency responded to Reuters. In our view, the 600,000-chip stockpile shows that easing US export rules was never the only gate: as long as Beijing rations imports to push local chips, Nvidia's China revenue will depend on decisions it cannot control, and Chinese AI labs will keep paying gray-market premiums.