Nvidia H200s Pile Up in Hong Kong as Beijing Withholds Imports

About 600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are stored in Hong Kong, waiting on a mainland import approval Beijing has not granted. Reuters reported the stockpile in an exclusive citing two people familiar with the matter.

The oddity: Washington cleared these sales. After trade talks between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the US walked back its ban on H200 exports to approved Chinese customers. It is Beijing that has now turned the valve the other way. The size of the stockpile, Reuters writes, 'reflects Beijing's reluctance to increase reliance on US technology.'

ByteDance and Tencent have each received about 10,000 of the Nvidia H200 processors in recent weeks, the first meaningful mainland shipments. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are together approved to buy more than 400,000 H200 chips, with each firm's US-licensed allowance put at up to 100,000 units apiece. Regulators have told the companies to leave most of that hardware in Hong Kong.

Scarcity has rewritten the price list. By late October, an eight-card H200 server was selling for more than 6 million yuan, or roughly $900,000, about triple its level one year earlier. Servers built around Nvidia's newer Blackwell chips, still restricted under US export controls, were changing hands above 20 million yuan, around $2.99 million.

Hong Kong, the parking lot in this arrangement, cannot actually run most of the hardware: the territory lacks the data center capacity to switch the chips on. The pile-up has also shown up in domestic chipmakers' shares, with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp falling as much as 7% in Hong Kong trading on the news and Hua Hong Semiconductor slipping nearly 6%. It is one of several chip-politics stories out of China we have tracked this week, alongside tungsten curbs on substrate drill bits and YMTC's paused Shanghai IPO.