Following successful advocacy with the Trump administration to authorize H200 chip sales to China, Nvidia is reportedly exploring increased production of these chips as Chinese firms urgently seek to place orders, according to anonymous sources cited by Reuters.
The H200 chips, representing the most potent iteration of Nvidia’s prior Hopper generation of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed for training extensive language models, were previously barred from sale in China. This was due to the former Biden administration’s proposed regulations restricting the export of advanced AI chips to the nation. However, last week, the Department of Commerce granted Nvidia permission to sell H200 GPUs in China, in exchange for a 25% share of the sales revenue from these chips.
Reuters has indicated that Nvidia is currently experiencing such significant interest from Chinese enterprises that it is contemplating boosting its production capacity. Nonetheless, Chinese authorities are still deliberating whether to permit the import of H200 chips, which are reportedly considerably more potent than the H20 GPUs Nvidia had specifically tailored for sale in China.
For the semiconductor manufacturer, ramping up H200 GPU production would enable it to capitalize on untapped demand within a country actively striving to cultivate its own domestic AI chip industry. Western competition and national security concerns have limited the availability of the newest and most powerful hardware for AI model training in China, prompting companies there to prioritize efficiency over sheer computational scale.
Chinese companies, including tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance, which are developing their own AI models, have already approached Nvidia to discuss substantial orders for the H200 chips, which are currently being manufactured in limited quantities, the report further mentioned.
An Nvidia spokesperson affirmed in an emailed statement, “We are carefully managing our supply chain to guarantee that authorized H200 sales to approved customers in China will not affect our capability to supply customers in the United States.”