Trump aprobó 750.000 H200. China no recibió ninguno.

What Happened

On Thursday, May 14, Reuters broke the story Jensen Huang had been waiting six months to read. The U.S. Commerce Department has cleared roughly ten Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200 accelerator. The approved buyers include Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, with distributors Lenovo and Foxconn cleared as well so Chinese customers can route purchases through them. Each cleared customer is permitted to buy up to 75,000 H200 units, putting the theoretical ceiling at about 750,000 chips if every license is fully drawn.

Under the framework Trump rolled out in December, Washington takes a 25% cut of the chip revenue. The same Reuters scoop confirmed the part that should make everyone uncomfortable: not a single H200 has shipped to any of these buyers. As TheNextWeb put it, “in practice, nothing has moved.”

Trump’s two-day summit with Xi Jinping wrapped on Friday, May 15, after Huang’s dramatic last-minute addition to the delegation. No chip breakthrough was announced.

Key Details

• The approved buyers: Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, plus distributors Lenovo and Foxconn.
• The per-customer ceiling: 75,000 H200 units per company, per Reuters.
• The revenue share: Washington collects a 25% cut of every sale.
• Shipments to date: Zero.
• Why nothing has moved: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a Senate hearing last month that “the Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they’re trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry.”
• The summit deliverable: Xi agreed to purchase 200 Boeing jets, well short of the 500 Trump had floated. Euronews flagged it as “the only major deal that was announced” before Trump left China.

Why It Matters

For Investors

Nvidia’s stock told the story in real time. Going into Wednesday’s close, NVDA was at $225.83. When Reuters published the Thursday scoop on the cleared buyers, with Huang already on the ground in Beijing alongside Trump, the stock ripped to a $235.74 close, a 4.4% one-day rally on summit-day hope. By Friday’s close the rally was fully reversed: $225.32, a 4.4% slide that took NVDA back to within 51 cents of Wednesday’s pre-scoop level. Two trading days, no chips, net 51 cents of price change. The tape is the cleanest read on this story you will find.

For the Industry

This is the second time the deal has failed to translate into shipments. Reports in January, including from Bloomberg and Tom’s Hardware, said Beijing was about to green-light H200 purchases. That didn’t happen. The Reuters scoop in May is licensing approval moving in the opposite direction: the U.S. side cleared the buyers, Beijing still has its foot on the brake. The framework now exists in a strange, semi-vacuum where paperwork is issued, orders booked, chips not moving.

For Consumers

This one is indirect, but it lands. Every quarter of frozen H200 demand pushes Chinese hyperscalers harder onto Huawei’s Ascend stack, which is exactly the outcome U.S. export controls were originally meant to prevent. SemiAnalysis estimates that high-bandwidth-memory supply will likely cap 2026 Ascend 910C shipments at roughly 250,000 to 300,000 dies, not the headline numbers Chinese state media has floated. Even at that constrained volume, the 910C delivers roughly one-third the BF16 throughput of Nvidia’s B200 and trails the H100 on inference. Every month Beijing keeps Alibaba waiting is a month CANN, Huawei’s CUDA equivalent, picks up more enterprise muscle.

The Backstory

The Dec. 8, 2025 announcement was the loud part. Trump posted on Truth Social that Xi had “responded positively” and that the U.S. would take a 25% cut on every approved H200 shipment. The site covered the framework at the time as a clean break from the Biden-era “Small Yard, High Fence” containment doctrine. (See the original analysis of the 25% deal for the full backstory.) That piece’s “Year 1: The Gold Rush” framing expected Chinese buyers would pay the 25% premium without blinking.

The gold rush did not arrive. Beijing’s State Council has launched a parallel supply-chain security review aimed at reducing dependence on U.S. chips, and Chinese tech firms were told to pause H200 orders earlier this year. A 25% kickback to the U.S. Treasury on every chip sale was always going to look, from Beijing, like both a tax and a backdoor: an opportunity for Washington to fingerprint China’s compute build-out.

That’s why Huang ended up on Air Force One. After the original delegation list went out Monday without him, Reuters and CNBC reported Trump called him directly to add him at the trip. Nvidia’s spokesperson made the framing explicit: “Jensen is attending the summit at the invitation of President Trump to support America and the administration’s goals.” Translation: a sitting Nvidia CEO was sent to Beijing to personally unstick a deal his stock price had already priced as done.

What’s Next

Three things move the needle from here. To start, watch whether Beijing’s State Council issues a formal go-ahead to any of the ten approved firms. So far the green light has been one-way: Washington said yes, Beijing said wait. Also watch Huawei’s 910C cadence: SemiAnalysis flags HBM as the binding constraint, with realistic 2026 shipments around 250,000 to 300,000 dies. Every additional Ascend die that ships into a Chinese hyperscaler shrinks the strategic value of the H200 channel, regardless of what Washington’s licenses say. Finally, watch the September 24 reciprocal visit Trump extended to Xi at the Beijing state banquet. If a working chip channel doesn’t materialize before then, the framework starts looking less like a deal and more like a recurring trade-summit prop.

The Take

The framework was never really a chip deal. It was an optics deal that both sides found useful for incompatible reasons.

Washington gets to claim it cracked the export-control regime open, replacing containment with a rent-collection scheme. The 25% revenue share to the Treasury, a clause without precedent in modern U.S. trade policy, turns Nvidia into a sovereign tax collector on China’s AI build-out. That is the actual product the Trump administration is selling: not chips, but a license to pretend American technological leadership is a revenue stream rather than a perishable asset.

Beijing gets to claim it’s holding the line on technological self-reliance. By telling Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance to wait, Xi protects Huawei’s Ascend ramp from being undercut by a flood of higher-spec U.S. silicon. The chip-hungry firms want the H200 desperately. The state has decided they cannot have it. That is the fact in this story that has actually changed anything on the ground.

The summit was the test. If the framework had commercial reality, two heads of state from the United States and China in the same room would have lit the fuse. They didn’t. They couldn’t.

The Bottom Line

Five months in, the H200-for-China framework has produced roughly 10 cleared buyers, a 75,000-unit per-company ceiling, a 25% kickback to the U.S. Treasury, one chartered flight for the Nvidia CEO, and zero shipped chips. The market briefly bumped NVDA on the December announcement and rallied harder on Thursday’s Reuters scoop, then walked back both moves within days. The next thing to watch is not another Trump tweet or another licensing approval. It is an H200 actually leaving a U.S. dock for a Chinese data center. Until that happens, the licensing pipeline is paperwork, the 25% rent is theoretical, and Huawei has exactly the breathing room it needs.