Huida's 600,000 chips are jammed and piled up in a Hong Kong warehouse, worth nearly one trillion yuan.

About 600,000 Huida H200 artificial intelligence chips are stuck in a Hong Kong warehouse, waiting to be shipped to China. (Bloomberg)

According to reports from Reuters and other foreign media, approximately 600,000 Huida H200 artificial intelligence chips are stranded in Hong Kong warehouses, waiting to be shipped to China. According to public price estimates, the value of these chips is between US$20 billion and US$30 billion (NT$655.3 billion to NT$982.9 billion). According to the report, this is the first time that the specific scale of the inventory has been publicly disclosed.

China's stance is widely interpreted as aimed at protecting its domestic semiconductor industry and reining in reliance on U.S. technology. Beijing appears to be pursuing a policy of supporting domestic companies such as Huawei while selectively allowing the use of Huida chips for AI model training and encouraging the use of domestic semiconductors for inference or running AI models in actual services.

The Chinese government has allowed some companies to import chips on a limited basis, thus delaying the entry of large quantities of goods. Although Chinese companies are accelerating the research and development of independent chips, the performance of the H200 is considered superior to domestic chips, and its compatibility with the Huida software ecosystem also makes it very attractive for training large-scale artificial intelligence models.

Several large technology companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, have only received about 10,000 H200 chips each, which is far from enough to meet the surge in demand in their artificial intelligence development fields. Although there are reports that some chips have entered the Chinese market through middlemen, the lack of approval for large-scale shipments has led to price increases in China's informal market.

According to Reuters, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on the export of H200 chips in mid-January and later adjusted the policy to allow some companies to purchase conditionally. Other reports indicate that Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent have received conditional purchase approval for more than 400,000 chips. However, partial approval has yet to be translated into actual orders as procurement conditions are unclear.

According to market sources, as of the end of October, the price of a server equipped with 8 H200 chips in China's gray market has exceeded 6 million yuan (approximately NT$29.48 million), which is approximately three times the same period last year. The unit price of servers equipped with Huida's latest Blackwell chips (subject to US export controls) has exceeded 20 million yuan.

At the same time, Chinese technology companies are also actively purchasing Huida RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards that comply with U.S. export control regulations. According to reports, ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have collectively ordered more than 3 million copies, with a total value of more than $35 billion based on list prices. These orders have nothing to do with the H200 inventory waiting to be shipped in Hong Kong