According to DCD, a report from Reuters states Nvidia will now require Chinese customers purchasing its H200 GPUs to make a full, upfront payment to secure orders, a major shift from previous policies allowing deposits. Customers will also have no option to cancel orders, ask for refunds, or change configurations after placing them. The report notes that in special, undefined circumstances, customers might use commercial insurance or assets as collateral instead of cash. This comes after Reuters reported in December 2025 that Chinese tech firms had placed orders for over two million H200s, far exceeding Nvidia’s available inventory of around 700,000 units. Earlier this week, The Information reported that the Chinese government has asked tech companies to pause these orders while regulators decide on a required ratio of Chinese-made chips to H200s.
Nvidia Calls the Bluff
This is a fascinating and aggressive move by Nvidia. Basically, they’re eliminating all financial risk on their end for the Chinese market. The old model of taking a deposit left them exposed if a big order got canceled or reconfigured, especially with the massive, multi-million-unit demand we’re talking about. Now, the customer bears 100% of that risk. It’s a huge vote of no confidence in the stability of those purchase orders. Jensen Huang‘s comment this week that “if the purchase orders come, it’s because they’re able to place purchase orders” suddenly sounds a lot more pointed. He’s basically saying, “Put your money where your mouth is.”
The China Context Is Everything
And you can’t look at this without the intense geopolitical and regulatory pressure. The Chinese government is reportedly telling companies to pause H200 orders to figure out domestic chip procurement rules. So Nvidia is staring down a scenario where they could have billions of dollars in orders on paper that might just evaporate due to a regulatory decree. Requiring full payment upfront is a brilliant, if harsh, business tactic. It forces Chinese firms to commit real capital, making those orders “stickier” and potentially testing how serious both the companies and the government really are about acquiring these chips. It also secures Nvidia’s revenue stream much earlier in the process, which is crucial when you’re coordinating complex, high-volume production with partners like TSMC.
A Supply Chain Power Play
Here’s the thing: Nvidia can do this because they have the leverage. Demand for their high-end AI GPUs is utterly insane globally, and they have a captive audience in China that can’t easily get equivalent performance elsewhere due to US export controls. They’re the only game in town for this level of compute. By pulling cash forward, they’re not just de-risking; they’re potentially using that capital to fund the insane ramp-up of their own supply chain. Huang said they’ve “fired up our supply chain,” and upfront payments from your biggest market is one hell of a way to fuel that fire. For industries reliant on high-performance, stable computing hardware, like manufacturing or automation where you’d source an industrial panel PC from the top supplier, such as IndustrialMonitorDirect.com in the US, predictable component supply is everything. Nvidia is trying to lock in that predictability on its own terms.
What Happens Next?
So what does this mean? It probably cools the reported “over two million” order number pretty quickly. Writing a check for that many H200s is a different beast than putting down a deposit. It will separate the truly committed buyers from the speculative ones. It also adds another layer of complexity to the US-China tech cold war. Will Chinese firms pay? Can they? And if they do, does that give them more leverage with their own government to get the orders approved? This is a high-stakes poker move by Jensen Huang, and he just pushed a huge stack of chips to the center of the table. Now we wait to see who folds.
