The news agency Reuters reported the stockpile on Thursday 5 November. Two people familiar with the matter gave Reuters its size on condition of anonymity. The figure has not been published before. The investment site GuruFocus noted that the size of the stockpile does not show how many of the chips Nvidia owns or how much revenue depends on future deliveries.

China has let some of the chips into the country in recent months, three of Reuters’ sources said. Several major Chinese internet companies have each received about 10,000 H200 chips, one source said. Small batches have also moved through intermediaries and indirect routes, but the sources did not say how large they were.

Nvidia, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek and Tencent did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The Information: Beijing wanted domestic chips for inference

The H200 is a data centre chip from Nvidia’s Hopper generation. It is not the company’s newest, but Reuters said it has features that Chinese alternatives cannot yet match. It is particularly useful for training AI models, especially with Nvidia’s software. In training, a model learns patterns from a large dataset.

Reuters cited a July report by the technology publication The Information. Chinese authorities had told companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek that they could get permission to buy limited numbers of H200 chips for training models, The Information reported. Total approvals could amount to fewer than 200,000 chips. For inference, meaning running finished models, Beijing wanted the companies to prioritise Chinese processors.

Washington has already allowed sales

Since 2022 the US has restricted China’s access to Nvidia’s advanced chips and the equipment used to make them. After trade negotiations, President Donald Trump’s administration gave Nvidia permission to sell H200 chips to approved Chinese customers. The permission came in December 2025, the Colombian site ColombiaOne reported. The site said the Commerce Department formalised a case-by-case licensing policy in January 2026, subject to customer screening, adequate US supply and independent testing. Beijing’s own restrictions stem from concern about dependence on US technology, Reuters reported.

Scarce supply has pushed up prices on unofficial markets. At the end of October, a server with eight H200 chips was offered in mainland China for more than 6 million yuan (about $900,000), one Reuters source said. That is about three times the price a year earlier. Sellers asked more than 20 million yuan for servers with the newer Blackwell chips, which fall under US export controls.

Chinese companies are also buying less powerful chips that can be exported legally. Reuters reported in October that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards, with a combined list price of more than $35 billion.