The U.S. Commerce Department has cleared roughly 10 Chinese companies — including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com — to purchase Nvidia's H200 AI accelerator, according to a Reuters report published as President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Beijing on May 14. Distributors including Lenovo and Foxconn were also approved. Yet despite the licenses, not a single H200 has been delivered to any of the approved Chinese buyers, leaving one of the most closely watched AI export decisions of the year stuck in limbo.
What the licenses actually allow
Under the terms reported, each approved customer can purchase up to 75,000 H200 chips. With roughly 10 firms cleared, the theoretical ceiling sits near 750,000 accelerators — a meaningful, though not unlimited, opening into a market the U.S. had largely walled off since the 2023 export controls. The H200 is a step down from Nvidia's flagship Blackwell parts, but it remains a powerful training and inference chip, and demand inside China for legal, high-end Nvidia silicon has been intense as domestic alternatives mature slowly.
The approvals reverse, in narrow form, an export posture that had been hardening. They also formalize a track that Nvidia has been pushing for repeatedly: a tiered access regime in which select Chinese hyperscalers can buy chips below the top tier, on a license-by-license basis.
Why no chips have moved
The sticking point is now Beijing, not Washington. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the Chinese central government "has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they're trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry." Chinese firms paused their H200 orders earlier in 2026 after guidance from authorities tied to a supply-chain security review, leaving the U.S. licenses theoretically usable but practically inert.
That dynamic flips the usual narrative of the U.S.–China chip standoff. For two years, the constraint has been Washington's willingness to license. Today, it is Beijing's willingness to let its national champions take delivery.
Jensen Huang's last-minute Beijing trip
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who had not been on the original delegation list, boarded Air Force One in Alaska after a direct call from Trump and traveled with the U.S. group to Beijing. He is reportedly pursuing two parallel goals: unlocking the cleared but stalled H200 shipments, and pressing for reciprocal easing on Chinese export restrictions covering rare-earth magnets and chip-grade gallium — inputs the U.S. AI supply chain still depends on.
The stakes for Nvidia are material but bounded. China currently accounts for about 5% of Nvidia's revenue, down from more than 20% before the 2023 controls. A successful unblocking would not transform the company's financials overnight, but it would re-open a strategic customer base — and signal that the two governments can negotiate at the chip layer rather than only at the headline tariff layer.
What to watch next
Three near-term signals will tell whether the licenses become real shipments: whether Beijing publicly relaxes its pause for any of the named firms, whether Nvidia begins booking H200 China revenue in its next quarterly disclosures, and whether Washington pairs the approvals with parallel concessions on rare earths. Until at least one of those moves, the H200 clearance remains a paper victory — meaningful as a diplomatic signal, but not yet a commercial one.
