Nvidia H200 chips stranded in Hong Kong as Beijing withholds import approval

What happened: About 600,000 Nvidia AI chips are stored in Hong Kong, waiting to ship to mainland China. Reuters reported the figure, as relayed by Yahoo Finance.

The numbers: Several major Chinese internet companies have each received about 10,000 H200 chips in recent months. Smaller quantities have entered through intermediaries, with amounts not specified. 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 triple its price a year earlier.

The context: Reports say ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards, with a combined sticker price above $35 billion. Benzinga reported the same chip stockpile.

In their words: Reuters reported: "Beijing has not approved large-scale imports of the H200 chips despite demand from technology companies."

The catch: One unconfirmed report says Beijing wants firms including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek to prioritise Chinese processors for inference, with total foreign-chip approvals possibly under 200,000 units. No other source confirms this.

What's next: No timeline or criteria for a Beijing decision have been published. US regulatory approval does not automatically guarantee that Nvidia chips reach Chinese customers.