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.”
The H200 isNvidia's Hopper-generation accelerator featuring 141GB of HBM3e memory. It sits below the current Blackwell architecture but remains roughly six times more powerful than the H20, the downgraded chip Nvidia originally designed to stay within earlier export limits. The H200 is what Chinese hyperscalers have been waiting patiently for.
President Trump announced in December 2025 that Nvidia would be permitted toship H200 chips to approved Chinese customers, with 25% of sales revenue going to the U.S. government as part of the deal.
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 wereready 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.
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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.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
Trump is proving he really cares little for the American people and our national security, but rather cares more about making $$$$$.
Just like his orders on glyphosate. Its poisoning our food, causing cancer, and other heath effects.
Its manufactured overseas and coming into the Untied States.
Instead of banning it Trump just made the production of it come to the USA for more $$$$.
Similar thing here. Not banning selling to the Chinese for "security" just making sure we get an 25% cut of the $$$.
