At a press event attended by Tom's Hardware at GTC 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the company has received export licenses for multiple Chinese customers, has purchase orders in hand, and has restarted H200 manufacturing, marking the first time its China supply chain has been back in motion since export restrictions froze shipments over a year ago.
Huang described the situation as “new news,” stating that Nvidia “[has] received purchase orders from many customers [in China], and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing… our supply chain is getting fired up.”
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The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security formally published the licensing framework in January 2026, and Nvidia confirmed in late February that it had secured a license to ship a small number of H200 units. However, it declined to include any China data-center revenue in its first-quarter sales outlook.
Chinese authorities granted ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent permission to purchase H200 chips in January, with the three companies collectively approved to buy more than 400,000 units, following earlier reports that Alibaba and ByteDance were ready to order over 200,000 chips each.
Nvidia had largely wound down Hopper-class production to focus on Blackwell, but in light of Chinese demand and the green light from Washington, the company said it hoped to reopen H200 orders in 2026.
Huang at the Q&A also said that President Trump’s position is that the U.S. should lead in access to Nvidia's best technology while still competing for global markets. "He would like us to compete worldwide and not concede those markets unnecessarily," he said.
The H200 approval covers only a 50% volume cap relative to domestic U.S. sales, and a third-party laboratory must verify each shipment before re-export to China.
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