Nvidia Unleashes H200 AI Chips on China's Mainland Market
Nvidia's long-blocked revenue opportunity in China may finally start to reopen as the chipmaker has begun shipping its H200 artificial-intelligence chips into mainland China. According to a report, ByteDance and Tencent each received roughly 10,000 Nvidia H200 processors in recent weeks.
The deliveries are still small relative to potential demand, with U.S. licenses allowing individual Chinese buyers to purchase as many as 100,000 H200 chips. However, Beijing has pushed companies to keep most of those processors outside mainland China in an effort to support domestic chipmakers.
Chinese regulators have permitted H200 deployment in Hong Kong, but limited data-center capacity and power availability make large-scale installations challenging. Nvidia reportedly has about 500,000 H200 chips in inventory largely intended for Chinese customers.
The development could create upside if H200 sales begin scaling faster than Nvidia anticipated. The company assumed zero China Data Center compute revenue in its fiscal second-quarter guidance, forecasting $91 billion in total Q2 revenue.