Photo by Nvidia has told its Chinese clients that it plans to start shipping H200 AI chips before the Lunar New Year in mid-February 2026, according to three people with direct knowledge who allegedly spoke to Reuters.
This will be the first shipment of these chips to China since President Donald Trump announced a new U.S. policy allowing such exports with a 25% fee.
The initial deliveries will come from Nvidia’s current inventory, and the company expects to ship between 5,000 and 10,000 modules, which equals roughly 40,000 to 80,000 individual chips.
Reportedly, Nvidia has also informed its clients that it will expand production and open new capacity for orders in Q2 2026, according to Reuters.
China has not yet approved the shipments
The shipments are still not guaranteed. Chinese officials have not given any formal approval yet, and the final timeline depends on Beijing’s decision. “The whole plan is contingent on government approval,” the third source told Reuters. “Nothing is certain until we get the official go-ahead.”
According to the report, emergency meetings were held earlier this month in Beijing to decide whether to allow the imports. One of the proposals under review would require each H200 chip order to be bundled with a certain ratio of domestic AI chips.
The goal is to protect local development efforts while still giving Chinese tech firms access to more powerful hardware.
These talks come at a time when Chinese chipmakers are struggling to match Nvidia’s performance. The H200 chip, which belongs to the older Hopper generation, still plays a major role in many AI systems, even though Nvidia has already started prioritizing its newer Blackwell and Rubin chips. That shift has made the H200 harder to get.
Nvidia and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology didn’t respond to Reuters’ questions. The three sources asked not to be named because the talks are confidential.
This latest move by the Trump administration is a reversal of the previous White House stance. Under Joe Biden, the U.S. banned sales of advanced AI chips to China for national security reasons.
But Trump, who returned to the presidency in 2025, ordered an inter-agency review to speed up H200 export approvals. That review is already underway, as Cryptopolitan previously reported.
Firms like Alibaba Group and ByteDance are closely watching the situation.
Both companies have expressed interest in buying the H200, which is around six times more powerful than the H20—a limited-performance chip Nvidia made specifically for the Chinese market.
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