GoKawiilUpdate 3/19/2026 4:50pm PT: A new report has emerged that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the Reuters story about Groq chips being prepared for shipment to China, which our article below references, is "totally false."
Original story below:
The silicon silk road to China is open once again: Beijing has given full approval for Nvidia to sell its H200 last-generation GPUs in the region. This follows months of back-and-forth talks between the U.S. government, Nvidia, and China, and though the Trump administration approved Nvidia sales, the Chinese government still needed to give the final nod.
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Now that it has it, Nvidia is gearing up for a big sales pitch to Chinese companies, Reuters reports, and not just for its H200 GPU. CEO Jensen Huang has said it has already received orders for the H200 chips, but it's arguably the Groq custom AI inferencing hardware that Nvidia is more keen to sell. After making a $14 billion deal with Groq, which develops custom AI ASICs — known as Language Processing Units (LPUs) — Nvidia wants to make a return on its investment. Can the company inject itself into the burgeoning market for Chinese inferencing chips?
An oldie but a goodie
The H200 isn't the latest in its AI data center efforts, but it is highly desirable for training LLMs compared to Chinese counterparts. (Image credit: Nvidia)
On the enterprise front, Nvidia had to restart the production line for its H200 chips, having spent much of the past 12 months pushing its successor, the B300, based on their newer Blackwell architecture, the same one inside RTX 50-series GPUs. The company ultimately wound down H200 production because of the regulatory hurdles it was forced to jump through, both at home and in China.
With China prioritizing its domestic industry and hesitant to let Nvidia hardware build a monopoly, it didn't seem like H200 could make its way to the region in any significant quantities.
H200 may be last-generation, but that doesn't mean it's incapable. It's much more powerful than the H20 AI GPUs Nvidia previously sold to China to curb its access to high-end hardware — around six times as much. Now that H200 is back on the menu, Nvidia has reportedly received a lot of interest from Chinese companies for it.
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