TECH NEWS – Nvidia, led by Jensen Huang, appears to be leaning on aggressive pricing to make up for the long stretch when it could not officially ship top-tier AI hardware into China.
After the Trump administration lifted restrictions on exporting Nvidia‘s H200 AI chips to China, the industry was left wondering whether Beijing would try to secure the newer accelerators, especially as the country pushes to reshape parts of its domestic technology infrastructure. On top of that, Nvidia is effectively introducing Hopper into China for a second time, despite previously floating a Blackwell option, which fueled skepticism about whether demand would be strong enough. Now, the company seems ready to address that uncertainty with a price point that is hard to ignore.
According to Chinese media, an 8-chip cluster built around H200 AI chips could land at roughly $200,000, which is said to be comparable to an equivalent H20 configuration. The catch is that the H200 comes with significantly upgraded specifications, and estimates point to a performance gap of more than six times. This is reportedly how Nvidia intends to make the H200 far more competitive in China, even though the product is not brand-new, having reached the market about a year ago, in Q4 2024.
China-bound H200: China supply essentially confirmed, yet only ~1.3x pricier than the H20…
According to Chinese media reports, Nvidia’s H200 sales to China are said to be virtually confirmed.
Also, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黄仁勋) is reportedly scheduled to visit China in… pic.twitter.com/OtMWhbSKQY
— Jukan (@jukan05) December 24, 2025
The report adds that Nvidia is targeting mid-February for the first H200 shipments into China, pending approval from U.S. regulators. Meanwhile, Chinese AI giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance are said to be preparing for a major spending wave after gaining access to H200 chips, potentially investing as much as $31 billion into infrastructure built largely around compatible hardware from Nvidia and AMD. That picture suggests the assumption that China would not be interested in Nvidia‘s H200 was off the mark.
The broader context supports that view as well. China cannot train frontier AI models without Nvidia hardware, which is why domestic hyperscalers are competing for H200 and MI308 AI chips, widely seen as the dominant sources of compute in the region. Companies like Huawei, despite notable progress, still struggle to match Western alternatives, due both to capacity constraints and the lack of a software ecosystem as robust as what Nvidia and AMD offer.
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