Nvidia H200 shipments to China begin
A US trade official told Congress H200 shipments to China have begun in trivial volumes; Reuters separately reports ZTE is among the licensed buyers.
Jeffrey Kessler, who oversees export controls as the Commerce Department’s top industry and security official, appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on July 14 and said shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chip to China and Hong Kong have begun. He described the volume as “very few” and, later in the hearing, “trivial.”
The disclosure follows a December 2025 policy shift that let the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security review H200 export license applications case by case rather than under a presumption of denial. In May, Reuters reported that around ten Chinese firms, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, had been cleared to buy the chip, though no deliveries had occurred at that point.
A separate Reuters report published the same day, citing documents and two people familiar with the matter, said ZTE Kangxun Telecom, a unit of ZTE Corp, along with server maker Maginfra and a Kingsoft subsidiary, had also been licensed to buy H200 or comparable AMD chips, expanding the known list of approved buyers beyond the internet giants named in May.
Why it matters
Licenses under the current policy carry conditions: a 25 percent cut of revenue to the US government and pre-export inspection. Kessler’s testimony confirms the license pipeline has started producing actual chips on the ground in China, not just paperwork, but the volume he described is small enough that it says little yet about whether Beijing, which has pushed domestic buyers toward homegrown chips, will let large-scale purchases proceed.