Roughly 600,000 H200 AI processors are currently held in Hong Kong awaiting delivery to mainland China, as Beijing has not yet authorized the import of the hardware in large quantities. This supply bottleneck has increased costs on China’s unofficial market, where servers equipped with 8 H200 chips now cost more than $900,000, which is about 3 times the price from a year ago.
While large scale shipments remain stalled, smaller volumes of chips have reached the mainland through unofficial channels. Some of the nation’s largest internet companies have acquired about 10,000 H200 chips apiece in recent months to sustain their computing needs.