The U.S. Commerce Department has quietly approved around 10 Chinese companies to purchase Nvidia's H200, the company's second-most powerful AI chip. The approved buyers include Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com. Distributors including Lenovo and Foxconn have also been cleared as intermediaries.

Each approved company can buy up to 75,000 chips under the licensing terms. At current H200 pricing, that represents billions of dollars in potential revenue for Nvidia.

There is one problem: not a single chip has actually been delivered.

Approved on Paper, Stalled in Practice

According to Reuters, which first reported the identities of the approved buyers, the deal is stuck in bureaucratic limbo. The approvals exist, but the actual shipments have not started. The gap between permission and execution has left what could be a major technology trade deal frozen at the worst possible moment.

That is the context for Jensen Huang's surprise appearance on Air Force One this week. Nvidia's CEO was not originally on the White House delegation to Beijing, but Trump personally invited him and picked him up in Alaska en route to the Trump-Xi summit. The message was clear: Huang wants to sell chips to China, and he needs political cover to do it.

Why This Matters for the AI Race

Before U.S. export restrictions tightened, Nvidia controlled roughly 95% of China's advanced chip market. China once accounted for 13% of Nvidia's revenue. Huang has estimated the country's AI market alone is worth $50 billion this year. That is revenue Nvidia cannot access right now.

Barclays analyst Jiong Shao put it bluntly: "The most important competitive arena today, especially between U.S. and China, is in AI, and the greatest bottleneck today in AI is compute. Having access to Nvidia's latest chips is very, very critical for the Chinese players to compete on a global stage."

Goldman Sachs expects the summit discussions to focus on trade and export controls, including tariffs, semiconductor restrictions, and rare earth exports. The bank does not expect a sweeping deal but sees the meeting as a "tactical catalyst" for Chinese equities and the yuan.

The Strangest Chapter of the Chip War

What makes this situation unusual is the gap between policy and reality. The approvals are done. The buyers are named. The chips exist. But the political dynamics between Washington and Beijing have created a situation where approved trade cannot actually move. Nvidia is caught between two governments that both want its technology but cannot agree on the terms of access.

The H200 is not even Nvidia's most powerful chip. That would be the Blackwell B200 and the upcoming B300, neither of which are anywhere close to being cleared for Chinese sale. The fact that even the second-tier chip cannot get delivered tells you everything about where U.S.-China tech relations actually stand, regardless of what the summit communiques say.

Lenovo confirmed to Reuters that it is one of the approved sellers. Nvidia, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, and Foxconn all declined to comment.

Sources: Reuters (exclusive), CNBC, Yahoo Finance