600,000 Nvidia chips sit in Hong Kong awaiting Beijing's approval

According to the Reuters report of 5 November, republished by The Express Tribune, the stockpile had not previously been reported. Three sources say Beijing has approved some H200s in recent months but not large volumes. One source says several major Chinese internet companies have each been able to buy about 10,000 H200s in recent months. The Information reported in July that the total of foreign chips China approves could stay below 200,000, less than a third of the Hong Kong stockpile.

The price of the constraint shows up in the grey market. According to one source, an 8-card H200 server was being offered in mainland China for more than 6 million yuan (about 900,000 dollars) at the end of October, roughly 3 times its price a year earlier. Servers with Blackwell chips, which Washington bars from sale to China, were priced above 20 million yuan. TNW reported on 6 November that Nvidia's latest quarterly report put H200 sales to China at less than 1% of data centre revenue and that the company booked a 400 million dollar provision for unsold H200 inventory.

Beijing's aim is to steer 4 companies, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek, towards domestic processors, particularly for inference, where a trained model generates responses for users. According to Reuters, the same companies ordered more than 3 million RTX Pro cards worth over 35 billion dollars in total in October; demand has not died but shifted to the product that passes the approval gate most easily. China's Ministry of Industry, the National Development and Reform Commission and Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment on 5 November.