US considers capping Nvidia H200 sales at 75,000 per Chinese customer

US officials are considering caps on the number of AI accelerators Nvidia can export to any one Chinese company, which would further constrain the chipmaker’s re-entry into a crucial market.

The Trump administration has talked about limiting Chinese firms to buying 75,000 of Nvidia’s H200 chips each, according to people familiar with the matter.

Shipments of Advanced Micro Devices’ MI325 chips, which have similar capabilities, would also count towards a customer’s cap, the people said. These accelerators – a prized commodity in the technology world – are used to develop and run artificial intelligence models.

Total shipments to China could still reach as many as a million units, the people said, citing an upper bound Trump’s team set earlier in the regulatory process.

But the lion’s share of current applications comes from a small number of Chinese tech giants, which under per-customer caps could collectively receive hundreds of thousands at most. The 75,000 limit is less than half of what firms such as Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance privately told Nvidia they would like to buy.

AMD and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees chip export licences, declined to comment. Nvidia did not respond to a request, while Alibaba and ByteDance did not respond outside normal business hours.

South China Morning Post