600,000 Nvidia H200 Chips Pile Up in Hong Kong as Beijing Stalls

Roughly 600,000 of Nvidia's H200 processors are parked in Hong Kong, and they are not moving. Beijing has held up approval for large-scale imports, according to Reuters, which cited two people familiar with the matter. The size of the backlog had not been reported before. Chinese tech companies want the chips. Their government is in no rush to let them in.

The H200 sits near the top of Nvidia's AI lineup. Chinese internet firms lean on exactly this kind of silicon to train and run large language models, so the hardware is less a luxury than a bottleneck. But customs clearance for the chips has reportedly been halted, leaving them a short hop from the mainland with nowhere to go.

The slowdown is stark. As of July, only a very small number of H200 units had actually reached China, according to the research findings. Meanwhile Washington has eased up: the US Bureau of Industry and Security now reviews H200 export applications case by case, against a set of specific criteria.

Those criteria come with conditions. Exporters must certify that China sales won't shrink the semiconductor capacity available to US customers, a requirement that could cap shipments at 50% of equivalent US end-use volumes. So even a green light from Beijing wouldn't hand Nvidia an open runway.

China's hesitation looks deliberate. Authorities are increasingly betting on homegrown AI chips to cut dependence on American suppliers, according to the research findings. Letting the imports through would speed up Chinese AI builds in the short term, but it would also keep domestic champions tethered to a vendor Washington can regulate whenever it chooses.

For Nvidia, the pile-up is a reminder that market access can vanish at either end of a trade route. US export approval is only half the fight if the destination country won't open the door. And hardware sitting in Hong Kong earns nothing until it ships, with no clear timeline for when that happens.