Nvidia's H200 GPUs could begin trickling into China as soon as this quarter, but there's a catch. Due to all the geopolitical turmoil that's ravaged US-China trade relations over the past year, buyers may need to pay up front for the coveted AI accelerators. And they won't get a refund if China decides to block the imports!

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that authorities in Beijing could green-light shipments of H200s - currently the most powerful GPU Uncle Sam has ever allowed Nvidia to sell in China - as soon as this quarter.

However, on the off chance that the Chinese government changes its mind, Reuters, citing multiple anonymous sources, reports Nvidia is requiring advance payment for the chips with no option for a refund if they're canceled.

These conditions, the report notes, aren't entirely new. Apparently, Nvidia has previously required advance payments from customers in the Middle Kingdom, but it wasn't uncommon for the chip biz to grant exceptions allowing orders to be placed with just a deposit.

For the H200, the newswire claims Nvidia has cracked down on this mandate in order to de-risk the transactions with some exceptions being made to allow for commercial insurance or asset collateral.

The Trump administration lifted a Biden-era restriction on Nvidia's H200 sales to China last month in exchange for a 25 percent fee on the resulting revenue. Since then, Chinese hyperscalers and model builders are said to have placed orders for more than two million of the now two-year-old AI accelerators.

Despite its advancing age and a growing number of domestic alternatives, the H200 is still among the most potent chips available in the region, boasting performance roughly 6x that of the H20.

TikTok parent company ByteDance is apparently so enthused by the chip that it plans to spend about $14 billion on them in 2026 alone.

Unfortunately for Nvidia, its existing stockpile of H200s won't be enough to satiate Chinese customers. According to earlier reports, Nvidia currently has about 700,000 H200 accelerators in its inventory and has approached TSMC about reramping production of the chips, which use an older process tech than what's found in its Blackwell and Rubin generations, to meet demand. 

Those chips, we'll note, still aren't available for sale in China, though Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang remains optimistic that, with time, its latest generation of chips will find their way to the Middle Kingdom. Huang certainly has reason to be excited about regaining access to the Chinese market. During an earnings call last summer, he quipped that China would have been a $50 billion a year market if the chip biz were able to flog its best products there.

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With that said, reramping production of the aging chips is inherently risky. With two generations of Blackwell GPUs and Nvidia's next-gen Rubin GPUs unveiled this week, the market for H200s outside of China has never been smaller. If trade relations were to sour between the US and China, Nvidia could find itself with a glut of outdated silicon on its hands.

It wouldn't be the first time US trade policy has caused headaches for the AI arms dealer. Last spring, the Trump administration moved to block sales of H20 accelerators to China. That decision was later reversed, but not before dealing Nvidia a roughly $10.5 billion revenue hit across the first half of its 2026 fiscal year.

Nvidia declined to comment on this story. ®