While the US Commerce Department gave a green light by lifting restrictions, it hasn’t exactly made life easy. According to Reuters, the agency’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) is sitting on thousands of stalled export applications, and Nvidia's AI gear is just one of many caught in the bureaucratic swamp.

No licenses have been approved for the H20 chips yet, despite the ban technically being lifted. One US official claimed this backlog is the worst the country has seen in three decades. The Commerce Department insists it is just being thorough, no rubber-stamping here, citing national security concerns as the reason for the slow crawl.

BIS has apparently gone quiet on industry players, booted out experts and shed staff through resignations and buyouts. The result is a clunky, jammed-up process with AI firms in China left waiting for chips that may take weeks or months to arrive, if they arrive at all.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has stopped taking new orders in China, anticipating a drawn-out approval slog. That is bad news for the local AI sector, which was hoping the H20 accelerators could fill the hole left by earlier US export bans.

The delays come on the heels of other questionable moves, including the still-MIA DGX Spark mini-supercomputer that Nvidia hyped for a July launch. If supply chain snags and bureaucratic inertia keep piling up, Nvidia's China strategy may soon need a hard reboot.