The White House has said that sales of Nvidia’s powerful H200 chips to China have not yet gone ahead, adding that Beijing has not approved the purchase by Chinese companies of the chips.
The approval for the sale of the chips to China by the Trump administration in January drew sharp criticism from those in US policy-making circles who are concerned that China is catching up to US dominance in the tech sector, and also that the chips may find their way into the Chinese military. Nvidia however surely views China as an incredibly profitable market that it wishes to crack.
On the flipside, Beijing is certainly interested in gaining access to the top semiconductor chips in order to build its AI infrastructure, and there are all sorts of back channels for the sale of chips to China. This includes recent allegations that DeepSeek was training its AI models on Nvidia’s top chip, the Blackwell.