US considers capping Nvidia H200 sales at 75,000 per Chinese customer
Shares of Nvidia slipped in late trading on the news, falling almost 1 per cent to a low of US$181
US officials are considering caps on the number of AI accelerators Nvidia can export to any one Chinese company, which would further constrain the chipmaker’s re-entry into a crucial market.
The Trump administration has talked about limiting Chinese firms to buying 75,000 of Nvidia’s H200 chips each, according to people familiar with the matter.
Shipments of Advanced Micro Devices’ MI325 chips, which have similar capabilities, would also count towards a customer’s cap, the people said. These accelerators – a prized commodity in the technology world – are used to develop and run artificial intelligence models.
Total shipments to China could still reach as many as a million units, the people said, citing an upper bound Trump’s team set earlier in the regulatory process.
But the lion’s share of current applications comes from a small number of Chinese tech giants, which under per-customer caps could collectively receive hundreds of thousands at most. The 75,000 limit is less than half of what firms such as Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance privately told Nvidia they would like to buy.
AMD and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees chip export licences, declined to comment. Nvidia did not respond to a request, while Alibaba and ByteDance did not respond outside normal business hours.
Shares of Nvidia and AMD slipped in late trading on the news. Nvidia fell almost 1 per cent to a low of US$181, while AMD dropped to US$197.07.
The per-customer restrictions would complicate an already murky picture of when – and to what extent – the world’s most valuable company can return to the largest market for its products.
Nvidia said last week that it still is not getting any data centre revenue from China and does not know whether Beijing will allow imports, even if the US gives permission. Washington has so far authorised only a small number of H200 exports.
China’s government, which must sign off on any Nvidia sales into the country, is balancing AI developers’ desire for best-in-class American semiconductors against years-long efforts to boost use of Chinese-made chips from the likes of Huawei Technologies.
US President Donald Trump said in December that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had responded positively to the H200 offer and Chinese regulators have told companies to start preparing orders.
Much hinges on Trump’s planned meeting with Xi in a few weeks’ time, when the US president is hoping to strike an agreement for H200 exports to nonmilitary Chinese companies, according to people familiar with preparations for his trip. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The H200 is the most powerful chip from Nvidia’s previous generation of products. It was the industrial standard for training and operating AI software like ChatGPT until Nvidia debuted its current-generation Blackwell line last year. It has six times the computational capabilities of what Trump’s team had previously authorised for sale to China and is far better than anything Huawei can make.
But Beijing rejected Trump’s earlier attempts to export Nvidia’s less-advanced H20 chip, even though AMD was ultimately able to sell some units of an equivalent processor. Trump then considered Blackwell shipments, but ultimately decided against them – at least for now – at the urging of several senior advisers. That made the H200 something of a compromise.
China hawks in and out of the Trump administration worry that H200 exports will only help China develop and deploy better AI models, with no benefit to the US. But Nvidia’s Huang convinced the president that such exports would contribute to “a positive economic relationship with China” and be “positive for us overall,” as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in January.
Nvidia’s logic is that keeping Chinese AI companies hooked on American technology will prevent Huawei from building the revenue and developer ecosystem necessary to compete on the global stage.
Nvidia’s reasoning, Lutnick said, without expounding on his own position,
There are plenty of people who disagree
“But that was Jensen’s argument,” he said, and “this is the president’s deal.”
While Trump’s H200 announcement in December was a major win for Nvidia, implementation details matter. Over the past few months, US officials have added a series of constraints designed to limit what many see as the negative impact of allowing H200 sales – while still following the president’s overarching directive.
Nvidia, meanwhile, has grown increasingly frustrated, accusing bureaucrats of undermining Trump’s vision and at times complaining that US export conditions are so onerous as to dissuade Chinese firms from buying H200 chips at all.
Those conditions include a requirement for exporters to assert that chip sales to China will not cut into availability for American companies, echoing a goal of failed legislation that Nvidia staunchly opposed last year.
There is also a mandate for exporters to certify that Chinese customers will perform “rigorous” due diligence checks to ensure AI chips sold to China do not benefit the country’s military, a concern Nvidia has dismissed.
It is unclear how Trump’s team will navigate this provision when making licence decisions, given that Washington has designated or plans to designate three of China’s four biggest tech companies as Chinese military companies – a claim the firms reject. BIS declined to comment.
Lutnick, asked in a February congressional hearing how he would enforce restrictions on military use, said that Nvidia “must live with and must hew to” detailed licence terms. He was also asked whether he trusts China will do the same.
Lutnick said,
I’ll leave that opinion to the president,
US-sanctioned Huawei Technologies brings ‘world’s most powerful’ AI compute systems to an international audience at MWC Barcelona 2026
Chinese telecommunications gear giant Huawei Technologies is introducing its latest supernode computing clusters to the international markets at this year’s MWC Barcelona, aiming to offer an alternative to US-led artificial intelligence (AI) systems from rivals such as Nvidia.
The Shenzhen-based firm plans to debut the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, a system powered by 8,192 neural processing unit cards, as well as TaiShan 950 SuperPoD, its general-purpose compute cluster, among its other computing products to the attendees at MWC Barcelona, formerly known as Mobile World Congress, which runs from Monday to Thursday.
READ the latest news shaping the Nvidia market at Newsvidia
US considers capping Nvidia H200 sales at 75,000 per Chinese customer, source
