The United States opens H200 sales to China

The Department of Commerce changed its licensing policy: applications to export the NVIDIA H200, AMD MI325X and similar chips will be reviewed case by case where security conditions are met.

There are three conditions: the shipments must not diminish the availability of semiconductors for the United States, the Chinese purchaser must have customer-screening procedures in place, and the products must pass independent testing in the United States. The decision followed a presidential announcement of December 2025. The logic inverted: instead of cutting access off, sell under supervision, so that Chinese laboratories stay on American hardware rather than building their own. Four years of restriction had produced DeepSeek and Qwen, which weakened the argument that the bans worked. The conditions in the rule itself. The Federal Register text of 15 January 2026 names more conditions than the three in the press release: no delay to United States orders, no diversion of foundry capacity, aggregate shipments to China and Macau of no more than 50 per cent of the volume shipped for United States end use, compliance with end-use controls, Know Your Customer procedures at the consignee, and third-party testing of every shipment before export.