600,000 Nvidia H200 Chips Reportedly Stuck in Hong Kong Warehouse

Beijing set its own limits

China then imposed restrictions of its own. In July, authorities reportedly told those three firms and others such as DeepSeek that they could buy the chips only in limited quantities and for training models. Total approvals would come to fewer than 200,000 units, because Beijing wants companies to rely on domestic processors, such as those from Huawei, for inference.

The gap between roughly 200,000 approved chips and 600,000 in storage points to a parallel market. Several large companies are said to have acquired about 10,000 GPUs each, though sources say the true volume is impossible to pin down given grey-market intermediaries and indirect routes, partly via Singapore. At the end of October, a server with eight H200 cards sold in mainland China for around 6 million yuan (about $900,000), triple the price a year earlier. Servers built on Blackwell GPUs, also under US controls, go for about 20 million yuan each.

Pressure on Nvidia

The news lands during a rough week for the company. Its shares fell sharply at the close on 5 November, and its board has announced a committee to oversee a case tied to alleged Chinese espionage involving CEO Jensen Huang. Separately, a Singapore data center firm and Nvidia customer, Megaspeed, was accused last October of channeling about $2 billion of GPUs to China through its subsidiary Speedmatrix.

For Nvidia, the episode shows how hard it is to control where its chips end up. For Chinese buyers, it shows how much they are willing to pay to keep access to them.