Nvidia Halts H200 Production As China Backs Huawei AI Chips

“The seized heavy crude may be worth more than a billion dollars at market prices, but Nvidia's H200 chips cost 10 times more,” he says.“Nvidia wanted Chinese firms to buy its H200 chips. It definitely felt the pressure.”

“By seizing Venezuela's oil, the US wants to show its muscle to the whole world,” a Guizhou-based writer says.“But China no longer accepts this. Over the past two years, China's chip technology has advanced rapidly. Besides, we also hold the rare earth card.”

“The US wants to use the H200 chips to squeeze the final profits from China, but the Chinese market has changed. The global supply of AI computing power has also been diversified,” he says.

Chinese media and commentators had previously welcome d the prospect of Nvidia's H200 chips entering the Chinese market. They said the H200 would be used for training AI models such as DeepSeek, while domestic chips would handle AI inference, a stage when trained models respond to user queries or perform real‐time tasks.

Jin Canrong, a professor and vice dean of the School of International Relations at Renmin University of China, said on December 19 that Trump had given China a good opportunity to upgrade its AI sector.

After the seizure the following day of the Venezuelan tanker, Jin changed his views. He said on December 25 that China might ultimately not need the H200 chips, as domestic chipmakers were preparing substitutes that could soon enter the market.

On the same day, the Fudan Development Institute published a research report stating that Trump's approval of H200 exports was primarily a strategy to help Nvidia preserve its dominance in the AI chip market, rather than a sign that Washington was easing its technological blockade against China.

Some Chinese commentators said banning Nvidia's hardware could provide more market space for Huawei Technologies' Ascend AI chips.

“China's ban on Nvidia's H200 chips seems to be a single issue, but it reflects the broader technology competition,” says a Guangdong-based columnist writing under the pen name“HY Skywalk.”“Washington's approach is to offer China advanced technology and maintain its chipmakers' market share. Beijing's response is to endure short‐term pain while accelerating development of core technologies so the country controls its own technological future.”

He points out that Huawei's Ascend 910B, Cambricon's Siyuan 590 and Biren Technology's BR100 are now being used for AI training and inference. He says Huawei's Ascend roadmap includes the Ascend 950PR planned for 2026, followed by the Ascend 960 in 2027 and the Ascend 970 in 2028.

Nvidia's Hopper AI chips, including the H100 and H200, are more powerful than most Chinese alternatives largely because they rely on high‐bandwidth memory (HBM), a type of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) produced by South Korea's SK Hynix. In a personal computer, insufficient DRAM can cause slowdowns or system freezes.

Hopper chips use SK Hynix's HBM3 and the enhanced HBM3e, while newer Blackwell processors use HBM3e. The next‐generation Vera Rubin architecture is expected to adopt HBM4. The higher the bandwidth of these memory chips, the faster the data can move between AI processors during training.