Advertisement
US says Nvidia’s H200 exports to China remain ‘trivial’ despite approvals
US commerce official Jeffrey Kessler says only a ‘very small quantity’ of AI chips have reached mainland China and Hong Kong so far
3-MIN READ3-MIN
1
Listen
Lucy Quagginin New York
American chipmaker Nvidia has shipped “very few” H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to mainland China and Hong Kong, a top Trump administration official told lawmakers on Tuesday, marking the first deliveries since the United States approved such sales.
US President Donald Trump cleared the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China in December, with the Commerce Department approving around 10 Chinese firms to purchase the powerful AI processors this year, including Tencent and ByteDance.
“For the American people, the bottom line is very few shipments against licenses for H200s and equivalents have taken place,” said Jeffrey Kessler, the US Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.
“Very small quantity of chips, so it’s trivial,” he added.
The sales of these chips mark a critical moment in the US-China AI competition, as Washington had previously sought to limit China’s access to America’s cutting-edge AI chips that could be used to advance Beijing’s military.
The Trump administration greenlit Nvidia’s older-generation H200 chips, not the company’s most advanced Blackwell line, which remains strictly banned from direct export to China.
Advertisement
Select Voice
Select Speed
1.00x