About 600,000 Nvidia artificial intelligence chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Beijing has not approved large-scale imports of the H200 chips despite demand from technology companies, though China has reportedly allowed some chips to enter the country in recent months, with several major Chinese internet companies each receiving about 10,000 H200 chips in the past few months. Three people said small quantities of chips had been shipped through intermediaries and indirect routes without specifying how many. The H200 is not Nvidia's newest AI processor but has capabilities Chinese alternatives have not matched, making it useful for training AI models, particularly when combined with Nvidia's software. US export controls since 2022 have restricted China's access to advanced Nvidia chips and the equipment needed to make them. With authorized supply limited, Chinese buyers have turned to intermediaries and indirect routes, pushing up prices in the unofficial market. An eight-card H200 server was offered for more than 6 million yuan ($900,000) in mainland China by the end of October, about three times its price a year earlier, the report said. Servers using Nvidia's newer Blackwell chips, which fall under US export controls, were offered for more than 20 million yuan each. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards, a less powerful export-compliant product, with a