Nvidia seeing ‘very high’ demand for H200 AI chips from China

Nvidia On Tuesday, CEO Jensen Huang said the company was seeing “very high” customer demand for H200 AI chips in China and signaled that the U.S. government would approve them for export soon.

Huang added that Nvidia has started producing the chips again and is working out final details on export licenses with the US government. Nvidia’s chips are critical for companies developing artificial intelligence models.

“We have mobilized our supply chain and H200s are flowing down the line,” Huang said at a press conference at the CES conference in Las Vegas.

Investors see the Chinese market as a big opportunity for Nvidia as the country’s technology companies develop their own artificial intelligence models. Huang has previously said the market could be worth $50 billion annually, and none of those sales are currently included in Nvidia’s estimates.

In December, President Donald Trump said Nvidia could export its H200 chip to China as long as the company pays 25% of those sales to the US government. The H200 is a generation or two behind the latest Nvidia models, but unlike previous chips that Nvidia has been approved to export to China, this model hasn’t been deliberately slowed down to comply with export restrictions.

China also needs to approve imports of Nvidia chips. On Tuesday, Huang said he did not expect China to make an announcement that imports were approved and that Nvidia would know the regulatory situation as purchase orders come in.

“We don’t expect any press releases or major announcements,” Huang said. “It will just be purchase orders.”

Huang added that any H200 sales would be in addition to the $500 billion two-year forecast the company provided last year.

“It looks like we’ll be going back to China,” Huang said.

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