“You’ve got the queen bee, that’s the chip, and then the ecosphere around it are the honeybees.” - Kevin O'Leary (aka: Mr. Wonderful)
Nvidia's H200 shipments into China and Commerce Department testimony calling the actual volume trivial, but this sends a message to OpenAI and Anthropic's competitors.
Let the countdown begin. Nvidia just enabled OpenAI and Anthropic’s Chinese competitors in a BIG way. Kevin O’Leary (aka: Mr. Wonderful) is right!
Nvidia’s H200 chips are shipping into China again, but a Commerce official just told Congress the volume is “trivial.”
A senior Commerce Department official sat in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week and used the word “trivial” to describe how many Nvidia H200 chips have actually reached China.
Here is the timeline. President Trump cleared H200 sales to China last December. Since then Commerce has approved roughly 10 Chinese companies to buy the chips, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD, and DeepSeek. Shipments have now started, the first since the approval. But Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler told lawmakers this week that actual deliveries against those licenses have been “very few,” his word, and trivial next to what those companies have ordered.
As Kevin O’Leary says “You’ve got the queen bee, that’s the chip, and then the ecosphere around it are the honeybees.”
Whomever controls the chips, controls the entire operation. The key advantage to OpenAI/ChatGPT and Anthropic/Claude’s success was based on operation using NVIDIA’s chips. Selling these chips to DeepSeek (a particularly strong competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic) could be disastrous.