About 600,000 of Nvidia’s H200 AI processors are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, Reuters reported, amid restrictions on imports of the chips to the Chinese mainland, as the country seeks to limit its dependence on foreign technology.

Chinese authorities have allowed some of the chips to enter the mainland recently, with several major Chinese internet companies each obtaining about 10,000 of the H200 processors in the past few months, the report said, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

Cloud capacity throttled

China is the source of the largest demand for Nvidia GPU processing power outside the United States, but sales of the to Chinese customers have become a political flashpoint amid US-China tensions.

Chinese companies also routinely turn to data centres in regions such as south-east Asia for Nvidia processing power, a source Nvidia has reportedly sought to limit in recent months, telling its data centre customers to limit Chinese companies to 49 percent of their sales.

China’s government has also imposed limits, with The Information reporting in July that companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek that they could receive permission to buy only limited quantities of H200 chips for training AI models, with total approvals potentially amount to fewer than 200,000 chips.

Limited imports

ByteDance and Tencent each received about 10,000 H200 chips earlier this year, according to a report in August.

For inference tasks, the government told companies to prioritise China-made chips, the Information report said.

Reuters reported in October that Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards, a less-powerful model, with the total orders being worth more than $35 billion (£26bn).