He noted, “the broader implications and potential impacts may signal to enterprise customers of Nvidia that perhaps they don’t need the latest and greatest GPUs from [them] either to achieve acceptable results across select AI workloads. It is doubtful that Nvidia would commission additional production issues for H200 without China as the customer willing to pay a premium price. Other customers will happily purchase this stock in lieu of China.”
And last month, Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, said renewed H200 access is likely to have only a modest impact on global supply, as China is prioritizing domestic AI chips and the H200 remains inferior to Nvidia’s latest Blackwell-class systems in both performance and appeal.
He pointed out, “while some allocation pressure may emerge, most enterprise customers outside China will see minimal disruption in pricing or lead times over the next few quarters.”
H200 now pulled onto the ‘geopolitical chessboard’
Forrester senior analyst Alvin Nguyen said Wednesday that he agrees with Dai’s assessment, especially with the recent developments of the US now permitting and China moving to effectively ban the import of H200 chips.
“This is older AI technology; it is still useful, but adding a premium to it when the Chinese AI ecosystem is catching up or caught up to what is being offered will make it a target for capacity rather than a first choice for enterprises in China,” he said.
“For global enterprises with Nvidia in their AI tech stack, it makes sense to maintain standards across regions/locations if they are able to bring in H200s into China,” Nguyen said. “Outside of China, this could lead to longer lead times and costs not decreasing, but global enterprises are already plagued by uncertainty and will adjust.”
