Nvidia makes Chinese buyers pay upfront for H200 AI chips as export risk looms

Nvidia is tightening the screws on one of its most important markets.

According to Reuters, the GPU giant is now demanding that customers in China pay 100% upfront for its H200 AI chips — with no refunds and no changes to orders — even though neither Washington nor Beijing has fully signed off on the exports yet.

Nvidia declined to comment on the report.

No refunds, no flexibility

Under the new terms, Chinese buyers have to lock in their H200 orders and put all the cash on the table before the chips are cleared for sale. Reuters reports that:

• Nvidia is not allowing refunds on these orders.
• Order changes aren’t allowed either.
• Some customers may be allowed to use commercial insurance or asset collateral, but the overall policy is far tougher than before.

Previously, Nvidia sometimes let Chinese customers secure supply with partial deposits, giving them at least some flexibility while export rules shifted under their feet. That safety net appears to be gone.

Beijing wants limits, not a ban

Bloomberg has reported that China is expected to let Nvidia sell H200 chips into the country. But there’s a catch: Beijing wants to block their use by the military, state-owned firms and sensitive infrastructure.

So Nvidia is moving ahead in a gray zone: demand is huge, but the political ground under the deal is still moving.

Demand is still red‑hot

Despite the uncertainty, Chinese companies are not backing off. Reuters reports that buyers in China have already placed orders for more than 2 million H200 GPUs for 2026, pushing Nvidia to ramp up production.

That appetite helps explain why Nvidia is willing to impose such aggressive payment terms. The company can assume that if one buyer balks, there’s another in line.

Scar tissue from a $5.5B write‑down

There’s also a painful recent history here.

Nvidia was burned when the Trump administration ruled that it needed a license to export its H20 chips to China. That decision forced the company to write down $5.5 billion worth of inventory it could no longer ship as planned.

The new H200 policy looks like a direct reaction to that kind of shock: push risk onto customers, not the balance sheet.

Walking a geopolitical tightrope

Nvidia now has to walk a narrow line between:

• Feeding surging AI demand in China, one of the world’s largest markets for data center GPUs.
• Managing political risk in both the U.S. and China, where export controls and national security concerns can change overnight.

Requiring Chinese customers to pay upfront for H200 chips — with no refunds, no changes and limited workarounds via insurance or collateral — is Nvidia’s way of staying in the game while trying to insulate itself from the next policy whiplash.

It keeps revenue flowing, production running and Chinese partners supplied — but at a much higher level of risk for anyone on the buying side of the deal.