After successfully lobbying the Trump administration to approve the sale of H200 chips to China, Nvidia is considering ramping up production of the chips as Chinese companies rush to place orders, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources.
The H200 chip, the most powerful of Nvidia’s previous Hopper-generation graphics processing units (GPUs) and made for training large language models, was previously not available for sale in China as the previous Biden administration proposed rules restricting the sale of advanced AI chips there. But the Commerce Department last week agreed to let NVIDIA sell its H200 GPUs in China in exchange for a 25% cut in chip sales.
According to Reuters, Nvidia is currently seeing strong demand from Chinese companies and is considering adding production capacity. However, Chinese authorities are still deciding whether to allow imports of the H200 chip, which is said to be significantly more powerful than the H20 GPU that Nvidia customized for sale in China.
For chipmakers, ramping up production of the H200 GPU will tap latent demand in a country that is rushing to develop homegrown AI chips. Competition and national security concerns in the West have prevented China from acquiring the latest and most powerful hardware to train AI models, forcing companies to rely on efficiency over massive scale.
Chinese companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance, which are developing their own AI models, are already in touch with Nvidia to capture bulk orders for the H200 chips, which will be produced in limited quantities, the report added.
“We manage our supply chain to ensure that the sale of H200 licenses to authorized customers in China does not impact our ability to supply our customers in the United States,” an NVIDIA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
