The U.S. Commerce Department has approved around 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia's H200 chips, but no deliveries have been made, leaving the deal in limbo while Jensen Huang seeks a breakthrough in China this week. The arrangement shows how a handful of state officials and corporate executives continue to decide the flow of advanced technology, while the firms and workers downstream wait for permission slips, security checks and political theater to clear.
Who Gets to Buy, Who Waits
According to people familiar with the matter, the approved buyers include Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com. A handful of distributors including Lenovo and Foxconn have also been approved. Buyers are permitted to purchase either directly from Nvidia or through those intermediaries, and each approved customer can purchase up to 75,000 chips under the U.S. licensing terms, two of the people said. The identities of the approved buyers and the nature of their relationships with Nvidia and the authorized distributors involving the chip had not previously been reported.
Lenovo confirmed in a statement to Reuters that the company "is one of several companies approved to sell H200 in China as part of Nvidia's export license." Nvidia, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com and Foxconn did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Commerce declined comment. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission did not respond to requests for comment.
The silence fits the usual script: decisions made above, consequences pushed below, and the people affected left to read the fine print after the fact.
The Deal Runs Through the State
Huang was not initially listed in a White House delegation to Beijing, but joined the trip after an invitation from President Donald Trump, a source said. Trump picked him up in Alaska en route to a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, raising hopes the trip could unlock stalled efforts to sell the H200 chips in China. Huang told state broadcaster CCTV on Thursday that he hoped Trump and Xi would build on their good relationship during talks in Beijing to improve two-way ties.
Before U.S. export curbs tightened, Nvidia commanded about 95% of China's advanced chip market. China once accounted for 13% of its revenue, and Huang has previously estimated the country's AI market alone would be worth $50 billion this year. Those figures sit behind the diplomatic choreography: a market of enormous value, controlled by licensing, export curbs and summit-level bargaining.
Despite U.S. approval, deals have stalled, as Chinese firms pulled back after guidance from Beijing, one source said. The shift in China was partly triggered by changes on the U.S. side, though exactly what changed remains unclear, the person added. In Beijing, pressure is mounting to block or tightly vet the orders, a separate fourth source said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at a Senate hearing last month that "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."
Security Rules, Revenue Cuts, and Controlled Access
The path to a completed sale has been obstructed by a tangle of requirements on both sides. U.S. rules issued in January require Chinese buyers to demonstrate they had installed "sufficient security procedures" and would not use the chips for military purposes. Nvidia must also certify sufficient inventory in the United States. Trump negotiated an arrangement under which the U.S. would receive 25% of the revenue from the chip sales, a structure that requires the chips to pass through U.S. territory before being shipped to China, as U.S. law does not permit the direct imposition of export fees.
The arrangement has prompted unease in Beijing over potential tampering or hidden vulnerabilities, even as sources describe it primarily as a workaround to legal constraints. Scrutiny in China has also intensified after the State Council issued two recent supply chain security regulations, prompting a government-wide effort to identify and eliminate potential foreign dependencies in critical technology infrastructure, the fourth source said.
Huang has warned that U.S. export controls are eroding the company's foothold in the market, saying its share of AI accelerators in China has effectively fallen to zero. Beijing's hesitation reflects a strategic calculation, as it fears imports could weaken a push to develop homegrown AI chips. While China's AI chips still lag Nvidia, firms like DeepSeek increasingly tout their reliance on domestic chips including those developed by Huawei.
The continued delay has been welcomed by China hardliners in Washington, including Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, who said, "Any deal that allows Nvidia to sell more chips to China means fewer Nvidia chips for U.S. firms, and a smaller U.S. lead in AI over China." McGuire added, "It is remarkable that President Trump keeps getting convinced to put Nvidia's interest ahead of America's."
What emerges is not a clean market transaction but a managed corridor of permission, suspicion and leverage, with the state on both sides setting the terms and everyone else forced to live inside them.