Since 2022, US policy toward advanced AI chips and China had a consistent direction: restrict access, tighten the list, repeat. On January 13, 2026, that direction reversed. The Trump administration formally approved limited sales of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to China — the clearest break yet from years of export containment.
What was actually approved
The approval is conditional, not blanket: Chinese buyers must demonstrate non-military use cases, subject to review by a third-party testing laboratory, before sales proceed. By May 2026, the Commerce Department had cleared roughly 10 Chinese companies — including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com — to purchase H200 chips under this framework.
The scale of demand
Chinese technology companies reportedly placed orders for more than two million H200 chips, at roughly $27,000 each — an implied order book of around $54 billion. That scale of pent-up demand gives some sense of how binding the prior restrictions had actually been.
The tariff attached to the reversal
Sales aren't happening tariff-free: any H200 shipped under the new licensing program carries a 25% tariff on importation into the US supply chain — meaning the policy reversal and the broader AI-chip tariff regime (see our related piece on Section 232 tariffs) are operating on the same chips simultaneously, from opposite directions.
Why now — and why Huawei is the real subtext
Multiple accounts of the reversal point to the same underlying driver: Huawei's emergence as a credible AI-chip competitor to Nvidia. Cutting China off entirely from US chips was, on this reading, accelerating the very outcome containment was meant to prevent — a self-sufficient Chinese AI-hardware ecosystem built around Huawei instead of Nvidia.
What it means going forward
For semiconductor and AI-hardware companies, the reversal signals that export-control policy is more responsive to commercial and competitive pressure than the "permanent containment" framing of the past few years suggested. For trade and export-control lawyers, the conditional, vetted-buyer structure of this approval is likely the template for how further loosening — if it comes — gets implemented: narrow, monitored, and reversible, not a wholesale policy change.
Sources: The Express Tribune · The Diplomat · CNBC