U.S. officials have approved Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE to buy Nvidia H200 AI accelerators, Reuters reported, adding another large Chinese company to the small group allowed to purchase the older Hopper-generation chips.
The approval matters because access to high-end AI hardware is now handled like a pressure valve in U.S.-China trade policy. Washington is allowing some Chinese buyers to acquire chips up to Nvidia’s Hopper family, while keeping newer Blackwell parts out of approved channels, according to the reported licensing setup. The permissions are decided case by case and carry a 25% export tariff.
Reuters reported that ZTE and server company Maginfra received U.S. clearance to buy Nvidia H200 chips. ZTE joins Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com among roughly 10 Chinese companies with permission for such purchases, according to the report.
Reuters also reported that an apparent Kingsoft Cloud subsidiary received approval to buy AMD accelerators considered equivalent to Nvidia’s H200. The report did not establish whether those approvals will translate into large shipments.
Approval from Washington is only half the problem
Chinese authorities still have to allow the imports, Reuters noted, and Beijing has been pushing companies toward domestic AI chips as part of its effort to build up China’s own semiconductor industry. The government has discouraged reliance on foreign technology and promoted homegrown accelerators, with Huawei cited in the broader market as one of the Chinese companies making progress in AI hardware.
That domestic push has not erased demand for Nvidia silicon. Reuters reported six months ago that Chinese technology companies had more than two million H200 chips on order, more than Nvidia had available at the time.
ZTE is a major Chinese telecommunications conglomerate. Its businesses include carrier network equipment used outside China, as well as phones, internet-of-things devices, cloud computing and AI-related work. That makes AI accelerators commercially useful for the company, assuming the licenses, import permissions and supply all line up.
Shipments remain limited
The current system gives U.S. officials a way to ration older AI accelerators without reopening access to Nvidia’s newest hardware. It also gives Beijing room to slow or block imports while telling domestic companies to buy Chinese alternatives. That is policy by choke point, with customers stuck between two governments.
CNBC cited a U.S. trade official who told a congressional hearing that “very few shipments against licenses for H200s and equivalents have taken place. It’s a very small quantity of chips.”
That caveat is doing real work. A license permits a transaction, but it does not prove that chips have arrived in data centers, that Chinese regulators have signed off, or that Nvidia will see meaningful revenue from the approvals. If H200 shipments to China become material, Nvidia’s later filings or earnings commentary should show it. For now, Reuters has documented more permission, not a flood of hardware.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
