The Trump administration is considering capping Nvidia H200 exports to individual Chinese companies at 75,000 units, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the negotiations. AMD's MI325 accelerators would count toward the same ceiling. No final decision has been made.
What 75,000 actually means
Both Alibaba and ByteDance have privately told Nvidia they want upward of 200,000 chips each, per SCMP reporting. That limit cuts their targets in half. Building the kind of compute cluster needed to train frontier AI models at scale requires tens of thousands of accelerators operating in tight coordination, so the practical ceiling isn't just about raw numbers. It's about what you can actually build.
Washington set an overall export ceiling of roughly one million H200 units for China, a figure that looks generous until you realize demand is concentrated in a handful of companies. Under per-customer caps, those same giants could collectively receive a few hundred thousand at most, leaving the bulk of that million-unit ceiling unused.
The deal keeps getting more complicated
Trump announced H200 approval for China on December 8, 2025, a sharp reversal of restrictions his own first administration helped build. A BIS press release that followed required exporters to certify the chips won't reduce US supply, that Chinese buyers conduct due diligence to prevent military use, and that each chip be inspected on US soil before re-export. The US government also takes a 25% cut of each sale.
Approved, but taxed, inspected, and now potentially capped. Jensen Huang framed the December decision as access to what he's estimated is a $50 billion addressable market in China. Per-customer limits, if implemented, would put a hard ceiling on how much of that figure Nvidia can actually reach.
Still not final
A December CFR analysis noted the H200 is more than six times more powerful than any chip previously available to Chinese buyers, and more capable than anything Huawei is expected to produce for at least two years. That gap is precisely what makes the export discussion so charged: the chip is old enough to sell commercially, but potent enough that regulators can't quite let go of the controls.
Trump is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming weeks, with H200 export terms on the agenda. Whether the 75,000 cap survives that conversation is unclear.
