Nvidia has begun exporting its H200 artificial-intelligence chip to China, a senior US commerce official told Congress on Tuesday, marking the first shipments since Washington approved such sales. Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, described the volume as “very small” and “trivial”, confirming that only a minimal number of the processors have reached mainland China and Hong Kong. The disclosure changes the state of play in the US–China technology contest: after months of licensing approvals, physical deliveries have now commenced, albeit at a scale that leaves the strategic balance largely unchanged.

Viewed from Washington, the shipments represent a calibrated step in export-control policy. The Trump administration cleared the sale of Nvidia’s H200—a previous-generation chip—in December, while maintaining a strict ban on the company’s most advanced Blackwell line. The Commerce Department subsequently approved around ten Chinese firms, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, to purchase the processors. A subsidiary of telecoms-equipment maker ZTE, server manufacturer Maginfra, and a Kingsoft cloud-computing unit were later added to the list of authorised buyers, broadening the pool beyond China’s largest internet groups. The licensing framework requires specific approval for each transaction, and Kessler indicated that the department has supplied Congress with a confidential list of applications and their status.

The practical impact is tempered by parallel enforcement actions. Nvidia has halved its client list in Asia, tightening due diligence in Singapore, Malaysia and Japan to prevent chips from being re-routed to China via third countries, according to the Financial Times. Company representatives now visit data centres, inspect contracts and interview end-users. In Beijing, meanwhile, some cloud providers have signalled to partners that they may receive H200 units soon, suggesting progress in Chinese import reviews. Yet uncertainty persists: China is simultaneously promoting domestic alternatives, and it remains unclear whether all US-approved sales will clear local regulatory hurdles.

The next milestone to watch is the expected announcement of new US regulatory measures on AI and semiconductors. Kessler told lawmakers that “future regulatory actions in the area of chips and artificial intelligence” are forthcoming, while defending the decision to delay adding more than 100 Chinese entities, including AI start-up DeepSeek, to the Entity List. That delay, according to people familiar with the matter, is part of an effort to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing. For now, the trivial flow of H200 chips serves as a test case for a licensing regime that attempts to balance commercial access with national-security controls.