Nvidia Still Awaiting H200 Export Licenses for China, Official Says
The U.S. government hasn't yet approved license applications for Nvidia to sell its H200 AI chips to China, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said this week.
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Kress, speaking Jan. 6 during a webcast hosted by J.P. Morgan on the sidelines of the annual CES technology trade show, said Nvidia is “very pleased” that President Donald Trump in early December announced plans to approve exports of those semiconductors to China (see 2512080059). But the company hasn’t yet seen any approvals.
“The ability for us to ship H200 to our China customers still requires a license from the U.S. government, and the US government is working feverishly right now on that process,” Kress said. “The customers have requested the licenses, and we are now awaiting that part of it.”
Kress said Nvidia “hopes that that gets done soon.” Customers in China are showing strong demand for those chips, Kress said, although Beijing has reportedly set limits on Chinese purchases of the H200 chips.
“It's not all something that we can right now control,” Kress said of the export licenses. “But we are very pleased in terms of the U.S. government's decision to do this. So we're going to wait and see what will happen.”
She added that China has a “tremendous amount of strong engineers and AI engineers” that want the H200 chips, and Nvidia believes demand from the Chinese market will only grow.
“It's going to grow very similar in terms of what we are seeing here in the United States if we can continue selling, going forward, with any of those different licenses the U.S. government has,” Kress said. “So more to be determined … but let's just wait to see how we can get our H200 moving soon.”