Washington has approved Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, and six others to buy Nvidia’s H200, with each licence good for up to 75,000 units. Beijing has told its tech sector to wait, and Jensen Huang has now been added to Trump’s Beijing trip to try to break the deadlock.
The US has cleared roughly 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200, the company’s second-most powerful AI accelerator, but not a single chip has been delivered, according to three people briefed on the licences and first reported by Reuters on 14 May.
The approvals from the US Commerce Department cover Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, alongside a handful of distributors, including Lenovo and Foxconn.
Each cleared customer is permitted to buy up to 75,000 H200s under the licence terms. On paper, that is one of the largest single-tranche openings to China since the Biden administration first tightened controls on high-end AI silicon in late 2023.
In practice, nothing has moved. Chinese buyers have held back after Beijing told domestic technology firms to pause H200 orders earlier this year, with the State Council pushing a parallel supply-chain security review aimed at reducing dependence on US chips. Order books exist, but the deliveries do not.
