Nvidia H200 and China’s Geopolitical Chess Game

It seems that the delivery of Nvidia H200 accelerators to China might not be straightforward after all. Reuters reports that China’s customs authority is speaking about a ban on importing these accelerators into the country. There is no official ban yet, but one source says that “the official’s language is so strict that it is essentially a ban at the moment.” Whether it is temporary or will soon be legally entrenched remains unclear. The reasons for the ban are also still unknown.

The situation is clearly complicated, as according to several sources, Chinese government officials also summoned representatives of domestic technology companies to meetings on Tuesday. They were directly instructed not to purchase chips unless absolutely necessary. However, how they will be able to buy them at all if the ban is indeed imposed is still unclear.

The United States is intensifying pressure on China. A law has been passed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the latest AI chips even through loopholes with cloud services. Rhodium Group’s analyst believes that China is trying to pressure the U.S. ahead of the April visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping. Beijing believes that the U.S. is desperately trying to sell AI chips to China, thus it is confident that China has levers to gain concessions from the U.S. in exchange for approval of licenses.

Kris McGuire, Senior Fellow on China and New Technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations