Tech companies across China are racing to secure AI infrastructure ahead of 2026, with orders for roughly 2 million NVIDIA H200 chips flooding the market. But here's the catch: supply is nowhere near meeting demand, and regulatory approval for shipments remains stalled. The gap between what these firms are hunting for and what they can actually get their hands on is massive—a classic case of geopolitical constraints throttling the global chip pipeline. This scarcity dynamic could ripple through the entire compute market, affecting everything from data center buildouts to resource-intensive applications.