Nvidia says its H100/H200 GPUs are not sold out, despite Jensen alluding otherwise during earnings call — company clarifies it has plenty of GPU supply

Nvidia's H100 and H200 GPUs, despite being a generation old now, sell like hotcakes. Their demand is largely predicated on the overnight surge in demand for AI applications across the industry, along with Nvidia being essentially the only company that can supply high-quality AI accelerators at such a rate. Over the last week, various reports have described a shortage of H100/H200 GPUs, probably spurred in part by CEO Jensen Huang's comments during the company's earnings call. However, Nvidia has now come forward to clarify that the chips are not sold out.

On the surface, this stance seems to contradict what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brought up last week in the company's earnings call. Huang alluded to industry buzz that the H100 and H200 GPUs were sold out due to high demand, specifically saying, "And you know, whether it's AI natives, or enterprise SAS, or industrial AI, or startups, we're just seeing just enormous amount of interest in AI and demand for AI right now. The buzz is, I'm sure all of you know about the buzz out there. The buzz is, everything is sold out. H100 sold out, H200s are sold out. Large CSPs [cloud service providers] are coming out, renting capacity from other CSPs. And so the AI native startups are really scrambling to get capacity so that they can train their reasoning models."

Both situations cannot co-exist as scarcity and sufficiency are mutually exclusive, so it is unclear if Jensen misspoke or was referencing incorrect reports, or if he didn't provide enough context around his comments.

Moreover, Nvidia's clarifying statement mentions the China-exclusive H20 GPU—made to adhere to U.S. export restrictions, denying any claims that its existence impacts the H100/H200 production lines. The company also says current-gen Blackwell products are seemingly unaffected by H20 sales.

Nvidia has been a lightning rod of controversy of late. There were rumors of backdoors present in said H20 chips that China called into question last month, which Nvidia firmly denied in an official blog post later. The company has also been asked by the Trump administration to give 15% of its earnings from GPU sales to China. Nvidia is also developing a Blackwell-based B30A GPU for China, which is reportedly faster than any Hopper AI chip. Nvidia is also currently ramping up production of its next-gen Vera Rubin AI chips in Taiwan. 

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