Nvidia Restarts H200 Chip Shipments to China After Ten-Month Freeze
At Nvidia's GTC 2026 conference, CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the company is restarting manufacturing of its H200 processors for shipment to China. The announcement ends a freeze of roughly ten months on advanced chip supplies to the world's second-largest economy, a period during which Chinese AI developers were left scrambling for domestic alternatives or older, less capable silicon. Huang confirmed that Nvidia has received purchase orders from multiple Chinese customers and that the supply chain is now actively ramping. The H200 shipments will be subject to a 25 per cent US duty and a government inspection regime. Officials are reportedly considering a cap of 75,000 chips per customer and up to one million processors in total. Nvidia's top-tier Blackwell and Rubin architectures remain off-limits for Chinese buyers under current export control rules.
Why it matters for Asia
China was once responsible for roughly a quarter of Nvidia's total revenue. Its return as a buyer reshapes the competitive calculus for the entire Asia-Pacific semiconductor supply chain. Korean and Taiwanese chip packaging and memory suppliers stand to benefit from renewed H200 production volume. Chinese cloud providers, many of which have been rationing compute capacity since mid-2025, will finally gain access to training-grade silicon. But for the Asian semiconductor ecosystem, even a partial reopening of the China market is significant news.^