Nvidia's H200 accelerators have begun arriving in mainland China. ByteDance and Tencent have each taken delivery of roughly 10,000 of the chips over the past few weeks, the Financial Times reported on August 19, as relayed by Engadget. They are the first H200 shipments to physically land in the country after a long stretch in which the export approvals existed on paper and the hardware did not move.
Beijing is routing most orders to Hong Kong
Chinese authorities have told companies to ship the bulk of their H200 orders to Hong Kong rather than the mainland — even though, as Tom's Hardware noted, the buyers do not currently operate data centers there.
What the licences actually allow
Roughly ten Chinese firms have been cleared by the US to buy H200s, a group that includes ByteDance and Tencent. Outlets differ on the per-customer ceiling: Engadget reports the approved buyers may purchase up to 100,000 chips each, while TECHi puts the licence cap at 75,000 per customer. Either way, the 10,000 units each that ByteDance and Tencent have actually received represent a small fraction of what the paperwork permits.
The gap between approval and delivery has been the defining feature of this policy. Washington cleared the sales months before any product shipped, and Nvidia at one point pulled back its China-bound H200 production entirely, redirecting that manufacturing capacity elsewhere in its roadmap. Shipments resumed only this month.
Nvidia's China market share and capital commitments
China was once close to the whole market for Nvidia in advanced accelerators. Before US export curbs tightened, the company commanded about 95% of China's advanced chip market, CNBC reported when the ten-firm clearance was granted.
Nvidia has committed capital elsewhere in AI infrastructure on a far larger scale. The company has been in talks to guarantee $250 billion for OpenAI's Ohio data center and announced a $500 billion-plus AI infrastructure partnership with SK Group. It also disclosed a $21 billion SpaceX stake in its second-quarter 13F. Those figures dwarf the roughly 20,000 chips delivered to ByteDance and Tencent combined.
Nvidia has spent the year building institutional scaffolding around exactly these questions, including an Open Secure AI Alliance that launched without OpenAI, Google or Anthropic.
Source: Engadget, reporting the Financial Times
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