US official: 'very few' Nvidia H200 chips have actually reached China so far

3:00 PM · July 14, 2026

A top US trade official testified to Congress on July 14 that shipments of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to China have begun, but that the volume so far is minimal. Jeffrey Kessler, under secretary of commerce for industry and security, said there have been 'minimal exports of any H200s to China so far,' calling the number 'very few' and later, in the same hearing, a 'trivial' amount. Back in May, the Commerce Department cleared roughly 10 Chinese firms — including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance — to buy the H200, but no deliveries had been confirmed at the time. Reuters reported separately that a unit of telecom equipment maker ZTE, along with two other Chinese firms, are among the latest entities to receive US approval to purchase advanced Nvidia and AMD chips. The testimony offers a rare, specific data point in an otherwise opaque area of US-China chip policy, where export licenses are approved in batches but actual shipment volumes are almost never disclosed — Kessler's comments suggest the licensing pipeline is moving far faster than actual hardware is reaching Chinese buyers.