Trump says China is blocking Nvidia H200 purchases despite US approval — says country 'chose not to' sanction purchases, pushing homegrown chips instead

President Donald Trump has said that Beijing is refusing to let Chinese companies buy Nvidia's H200 AI chips, telling reporters aboard Air Force One after the conclusion of a two-day summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that China "chose not to" approve the purchases because "they want to develop their own," according to Bloomberg.

The remarks came a day after a report claiming the U.S. Commerce Department had cleared roughly 10 Chinese firms to buy H200s, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, but no chips have shipped.

The U.S. side of the export licensing framework is now largely in place, with distributors Lenovo and Foxconn having also received approval. Under terms formalized in January, each H200 must pass through U.S. territory for third-party inspection before re-export to China, and Nvidia must remit a 25% fee on every sale to the U.S. Treasury.

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None of that matters if Beijing won't let its companies place orders. Trump said Friday that the topic came up during his meetings with Xi and that "something could happen," but characteristically offered no specifics. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the same day that any movement on H200 purchases is now up to China.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made a similar point last month, saying that Beijing has blocked imports in an effort to steer investment toward domestic chipmakers like Huawei. Chinese companies that had placed purchase orders with Nvidia earlier this year later informed the company they couldn’t follow through.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wasn’t on the original delegation list for the Beijing summit but was added at the last minute, boarding Air Force One during a refueling stop in Alaska. His presence raised expectations of a breakthrough on H200 sales, but Trump's post-summit comments suggest the impasse remains. Tom's Hardware has reached out to Nvidia for comment.

Nvidia's $78 billion annual revenue guidance assumes zero H200 recovery from China, but analysts estimate a functioning export framework would restore $3.5 billion to $4 billion in annual revenue from the country, where Nvidia's market share has fallen from roughly 95% to what Huang has described as essentially zero.

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Trump also said he discussed AI guardrails with Xi during the summit, describing them as "standard guardrails that we talk about all the time." U.S. officials had previewed the topic ahead of the trip, telling reporters the administration would explore opening a dedicated bilateral channel for regular AI discussions.

The White House last month also unveiled measur es targeting distillation attacks, a practice in which Chinese AI developers are accused of extracting outputs from frontier U.S. models built by companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to train competing systems at lower cost.

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