U.S. May Cap Nvidia H200 Sales to Any One Chinese Buyer

The latest turn in Nvidia’s China story is not a full policy reversal. It is Washington trying to make the opening smaller before it really begins. U.S. officials are discussing a rule that would cap any one Chinese buyer at 75,000 Nvidia H200 chips, with AMD’s MI325 chips counted toward that same limit. China could still receive more chips overall, but the cap would hit the biggest customers first. It could be less than half of what companies like Alibaba and ByteDance had privately told Nvidia they wanted.

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H200 sales were already supposed to be the compromise. Trump said in December the U.S. would allow the chips into China, but Reuters later reported that the January rules came loaded with conditions. Nvidia would have to show there was enough supply for the U.S. market, and Chinese buyers would have to meet security requirements and stay away from military use. So this was never a clean reopening. 

It was a restricted deal dressed up as market access.

Even that limited reopening has barely become real business. Reports say that China still has not received any H200 chips. Earlier reporting said Chinese firms had asked for more than 2 million of them, while Nvidia’s available inventory was around 700,000. Beijing later approved more than 400,000 chips for ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, but those approvals came with enough strings attached that buyers were still not turning them into actual orders.

With all that proposed 75,000-chip cap is worth watching. It would not shut the door on Nvidia in China. It would show what kind of door this was all along. The chips may still be allowed in, but only in a form that keeps any one Chinese company from building too much, too quickly.