ByteDance and Tencent each took delivery of roughly 10,000 Nvidia H200 accelerators in recent weeks, the Financial Times reports. Beijing's NDRC still gates every purchase, and most of each firm's 100,000-unit licensed allowance must stay in Hong Kong — where there's no power to run it.
Key facts
- ByteDance and Tencent each received ~10,000 H200s
- Licensed allowance up to 100,000 units per company
- Nvidia holds ~500,000 H200s for Chinese customers
- Full allowance = 12,500 servers, 125 MW IT load
- Hong Kong: 47 data centers, 581 MW total capacity
The first meaningful H200 shipments have reached mainland China. ByteDance and Tencent each took roughly 10,000 units in recent weeks, per the Financial Times via Tom's Hardware, marking the first real movement since President Trump approved exports last December. Washington licensed roughly 10 firms — Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, JD.com among them — in exchange for a 25% cut of each sale to the U.S. Treasury.
Beijing's posture explains the trickle. Every order still needs case-by-case sign-off from the National Development and Reform Commission, and regulators want most of each company's licensed allowance — up to 100,000 units apiece, per the FT — parked in Hong Kong, not on the mainland. Nvidia is reportedly holding around 500,000 H200s built largely for Chinese customers. As recently as mid-July, a U.S. trade official told Congress only a very small quantity had shipped against the licenses.
The power math doesn't work
The bottleneck isn't just regulatory. The H200 draws up to 700W; a loaded eight-GPU HGX H200 server pulls roughly 10 kW. One company's full 100,000-unit allowance equals about 12,500 servers and 125 MW of IT load. Nvidia's reported 500,000-unit stockpile translates to roughly 625 MW.
Hong Kong's entire installed base is 47 data centers totaling about 581 MW, per Hong Kong Free Press, with an average PUE of 1.62 pushing grid draw well above IT load. "It's a dilemma," a person familiar with the situation told the FT — companies can't find anywhere in the territory to deploy the chips. The Northern Metropolis cluster meant to fix the shortfall, awarded to Range Intelligent Computing in March, isn't slated online until 2029.
The zero-to-something story
Jensen Huang told investors Nvidia's China market share fell from 95% to zero during the blockade. These shipments don't reverse that — 20,000 units against a 1-million-unit combined allowance is a rounding error. But Lenovo and other partners told Chinese customers last week they could resume H200 server orders, per the FT, even if each purchase still needs NDRC sign-off. The channel is opening, however slowly. Whether the infrastructure catches up is the open question — and Huawei's Ascend line is competing for the same inference workloads in the interim.
Key Takeaways
- ByteDance and Tencent each received ~10,000 Nvidia H200s, the first meaningful China shipments since December.
- Beijing still gates purchases and wants most of the 100,000-unit allowance in power-starved Hong Kong.
What to watch
Watch for NDRC approval rates over the next two quarters and whether Hong Kong data center operators announce new capacity deals. Also track Nvidia's next earnings call for any revision to the ~500,000-unit H200 stockpile figure and whether China market share moves off zero.
Source: tomshardware.com
