Washington opened H200 licensing for China in January; Beijing restricted the purchases, and licensed shipments came to less than 1% of Data Center revenue in the quarter to July 26. On the token, Chinese developers drew 47.9% of OpenRouter's text requests in the week of October 5.
Both capitals fence the chip, so it trades in two markets. The token is fenced only for national-security buyers and trades as one.
Two markets for chips, one for tokens
Chinese weights sell into the West on price and through American clouds: the fence splits silicon, and the token market stays one.
Current Nvidia GPU pricing reflects today's scarcity, but a duration mismatch—data centers taking 3-5 years to build while chips iterate into new generations with very different power and cooling requirements every 12-18 months—undermines any…
The controls worked on compute, the West still owns the platform, and buyers carry the split up into optics and models.
China has spent five decades trying to become the world's leading superpower and is now the world's supplier, but has not yet successfully become the world's platform despite investing in overseas ventures, foreign aid, technology reverse…
China holds the minerals, the factories and its own chips, so a US fence raises American costs before it slows China.
Dismissing China's technological progress as merely the product of subsidies, IP theft and cheap labour looks increasingly dangerous, whatever one's view of China as an investable market.