U.S. Approved H200 Sales to Ten Chinese Firms — But Zero Chips Have Shipped美方批准十家中企购买H200，但实际交货量为零

The U.S. Department of Commerce cleared approximately ten Chinese firms — including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance — to purchase Nvidia's H200 processor at up to 75,000 units per customer, following Trump's partial rollback of the AI chip export ban. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced purchase orders from Chinese customers and said manufacturing has restarted for that market.

Despite the regulatory approval, no H200 deliveries have been made. The deal sits in legal limbo because of ongoing U.S.-China tech-rivalry litigation and Beijing's new supply-chain regulations, which have effectively frozen fulfilment.

The practical consequence is that China's largest cloud providers — already running Huawei Ascend 950PR and Cambricon hardware — cannot yet access the U.S. chips they have been approved to buy. The delivery freeze extends the period during which domestic chip substitution remains the only viable compute path, reinforcing demand for the Ascend and Cambricon ecosystems that have been scaling in parallel.