Washington cleared the H200 for China; Beijing won't let anyone buy it
After a year of bans and reversals, the US approved limited H200 sales — then Beijing told firms to pause and pushed Huawei instead
Summary
By June 2026 the US Commerce Department had moved H200 licences to case-by-case review and cleared roughly 10 Chinese firms (Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance among them) for up to 75,000 units each, while clarifying the rules extend to those firms' overseas subsidiaries. No chips have shipped: Beijing told companies to pause purchases, weighed forced-ratio buying of domestic processors, and steered demand to Huawei, Cambricon and Alibaba. Nvidia's China AI-accelerator share reportedly fell from ~95% to ~55%. The episode caps a year of bans, an un-ban, a 25% tariff and new licensing.
Why it matters
The world's two largest economies have both made the most advanced AI chips politically un-shippable, accelerating a hard bifurcation of the compute supply chain — the silicon counterpart to China blacklists MP Materials and USA Rare Earth.