American chipmaker Nvidia has shipped “very few” H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to mainland China and Hong Kong, a top Trump administration official told lawmakers on Tuesday, marking the first deliveries since the United States approved such sales.
US President Donald Trump cleared the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China in December, with the Commerce Department approving around 10 Chinese firms to purchase the powerful AI processors this year, including Tencent and ByteDance.
“For the American people, the bottom line is very few shipments against licenses for H200s and equivalents have taken place,” said Jeffrey Kessler, the US Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.
“Very small quantity of chips, so it’s trivial,” he added.
The sales of these chips mark a critical moment in the US-China AI competition, as Washington had previously sought to limit China’s access to America’s cutting-edge AI chips that could be used to advance Beijing’s military.
The Trump administration greenlit Nvidia’s older-generation H200 chips, not the company’s most advanced Blackwell line, which remains strictly banned from direct export to China.
Some experts previously warned that Chinese companies may not be interested in American hardware, citing security concerns and a push for domestic chip self-sufficiency.
Liu Chang, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said that China’s position on US chip exports has been consistent.
“We advocate that China and the United States achieve mutual benefit and win-win outcomes through cooperation. We oppose the politicisation, instrumentalisation, and weaponisation of technological and economic issues,” he said.
Kessler was testifying about the budget for the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which is part of the US Department of Commerce.
The hearing titled “FY27 BIS Budget: the AI Arms Race and the ICTS Office” examined the administration’s proposed funding for export controls amid intensifying technology competition with China. BIS has requested US$450 million for the 2027 financial year.
US lawmaker calls for more Chinese companies to be blacklisted
Elsewhere in the hearing, US representative Gregory Meeks, who is the committee’s top Democrat, criticised the department for not adding any Chinese companies to the export control list since October 2025 – the longest time period in over a decade.
“The president has turned them into a bargaining chip in broader negotiations with China, and as a result, the administration has issued virtually no significant new export control rules with respect to China and Russia, despite being in office for a year and a half,” Meeks said.
Kessler countered that, saying it was important to enforce the restrictions on the Chinese companies already on the existing list.
Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast echoed Meeks’ comments, urging that more Chinese companies be put on the blacklist.
“Success means putting every company that the Department of War has identified as a Chinese military company on the entity list,” Mast said.
ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc., Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Tencent Holdings Ltd., and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. are on the Pentagon watch list. Meanwhile, YMTC is the only one that appears on a blacklist overseen by Kessler’s bureau.
Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.
Additionally, Mast sought further steps to keep China from getting access to Nvidia’s even more powerful Blackwell chips. Before Nvidia introduced its Blackwell architecture in 2024, the H200 was its most powerful chip on the market.
The US and China have agreed to hold formal discussions on AI governance following Xi and Trump’s summit in Beijing in May.
China, US go head-to-head as global AI race ramps up
Tuesday’s hearing highlights a global AI contest that has increasingly become a direct competition between the United States and China.
The two countries have historically taken different approaches to AI, with the US sector relying on private investment, where companies focused on developing top-performing models and building out the best compute.
China, meanwhile, has emphasised open-source and open-weight models in addition to large-scale industrial deployment across industries with heavy government subsidies.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped reinforce the US’ early lead in the global AI race, but advances by Chinese firms such as DeepSeek in 2025 and Beijing’s push to become a world leader in the sector by 2030 began to close the gap between the world’s two largest economies.
Mythos, a powerful model developed by America’s Anthropic, was another win for the US, though it also sparked national security concerns.
China’s recent advancements have led the Trump administration to place increasing emphasis on competing with the country as part of its AI policy.
In June, the Trump administration indicated a shift away from a laissez-faire approach that prioritised innovation, signing a long-awaited executive order on AI and asking companies to voluntarily share advanced models before release.
The signing came less than two weeks after Trump initially postponed signing a similar order, saying that it could hinder competitiveness with China in the field.
“We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office at the time. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
