ah is an 8-bit register. It's the high part of ax, part of eax, part of rax. Sane place it's always been.
If you really want to use ah:
xor rax, rax
mov ah, 1
; now rax is 16 - sys_ioctl
In DOS, ah controls the subfunction of int 21h. If you want to use ah for practical purposes, you may want to install DosBox.
; nasm -f bin hello.asm -o hello.com
mov ah, 9
mov dx, msg
int 21h
ret
msg db "Hello World!$"
Best,
Frank