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China may tap Nvidia’s H200 for AI gains but domestic chip strategy here to stay: analysts

Despite Trump easing curbs, domestic chipmakers expected to remain central to Beijing’s tech ambitions

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The chip industry remains a crucial battleground in the US-China tech rivalry, with the high-end market still dominated by American, Japanese and European companies Photo: Shutterstock Images
Ji Siqiin Beijing
Beijing’s push to advance the domestic chip industry will remain unchanged regardless of whether it allows Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200, analysts said.
Days after US President Donald Trump announced Washington would permit Nvidia to ship the chips to approved Chinese customers – on the condition that 25 per cent be “paid” to the United States – Beijing has yet to publicly state whether it will approve purchases.

So far, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued the only official response. Spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Tuesday that Beijing had “taken note of the relevant reports” and that it “consistently advocates for mutual benefit and win-win cooperation between China and the United States.”

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Compared with the older-generation H20 – already cleared for sale in China – the H200 is about six times faster, boasts about 50 per cent more memory and sells for more than twice the average price, according to a Wednesday research note from Morgan Stanley analysts led by Gary Yu.

“This is an incremental improvement in geopolitical tensions, reducing the risk of a worst[-case] scenario where China lacks access to high-performing GPUs [graphics processing units],” they said.

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The analysts do not expect Beijing to push back against cloud service providers buying the H200, as this would support the scaling up of China’s large language models.

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