About 600,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips are sitting in warehouses in Hong Kong, awaiting shipment to mainland China, as Beijing withholds approval for large-scale imports despite strong demand from the country’s technology firms.
The size of the stockpile of H200 chips, which has not previously been reported, was disclosed by two people familiar with the matter, Reuters reported on Thursday. China has allowed some of the chips into the country in recent months, and several major internet companies have each obtained about 10,000 H200 chips in the past few months, one of the people said. Small quantities have also been shipped through intermediaries and indirect routes.
The backlog captures a tension at the heart of the US-China technology rivalry. Beijing is reluctant to deepen its dependence on American technology, yet Chinese companies need Nvidia’s computing power to meet surging demand for artificial intelligence in the world’s second-largest economy. The H200 is not Nvidia’s newest processor, but it has capabilities that Chinese alternatives have yet to match, making it valuable for training AI models, particularly when combined with Nvidia’s software.
With authorised supply constrained, buyers have turned to intermediaries and unofficial channels, pushing prices sharply higher. 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 with the matter said. Servers using Nvidia’s newer Blackwell chips, which fall under US export controls, were offered for more than 20 million yuan apiece.
Washington has sought since 2022 to restrict China’s access to advanced Nvidia chips and the equipment needed to make them. The United States barred exports of the H200 to China before President Donald Trump’s administration gave Nvidia permission last year to sell the chips to approved Chinese customers, a shift that followed US-China trade negotiations. Beijing has since imposed its own constraints on H200 imports.
Technology publication The Information reported in July that Chinese officials had told companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek, that they could receive permission to buy limited quantities of H200 chips for training AI models. It reported that total approvals could amount to fewer than 200,000 chips, and that Beijing wanted firms to prioritise Chinese processors for inference — the task of running AI models.
Reuters reported last month that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than three million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards, a less powerful export-compliant product, with a combined sticker price exceeding $35 billion.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Nvidia or Chinese tech companies Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek and Tencent.
Note on sourcing: this report rests on unnamed sources familiar with the matter, as cited by Reuters, and the size of the stockpile has not been independently confirmed.
Sources: Reuters, “Exclusive — Nvidia chips pile up in Hong Kong as China withholds import approval”, 5 November 2026 (https://1027wbow.com/2026/11/05/exclusive-nvidia-chips-pile-up-in-hong-kong-as-china-withholds-import-approval/); The Information, July 2026.
