NEW YORK, Jan 7, 2026, 07:58 EST — Premarket
- Nvidia shares were down about 0.5% ahead of the open after a strong AI-led session on Wall Street.
- CEO Jensen Huang said China demand for the H200 chip will show up in purchase orders, not public approvals.
- Traders are watching U.S. jobs data due before the bell and Nvidia’s Feb. 25 results.
Nvidia (NVDA.O) shares fell about 0.5% to $187.24 in premarket trading on Wednesday, after closing at $188.10. CEO Jensen Huang said at CES that any Chinese clearance to import Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence (AI) data-center GPU — short for graphics processing unit — would show up through “purchase orders,” not a formal announcement, as the company waits for U.S. export licenses. 1
The update lands as investors keep treating Nvidia as a bellwether for the AI rally that drove the S&P 500 and Dow to record closes on Tuesday. U.S. index futures were slightly lower ahead of ADP’s private payrolls report at 8:15 a.m. ET and the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) after the open, data that traders use to gauge the path of interest rates. 2
Huang also said Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform is in full production and could sharply reduce cooling needs in data centers, a key cost line as cloud firms add AI capacity. He said “no water chillers are necessary” for data centers, and Barclays analysts led by Julian Mitchell cautioned that while the claim sounded dramatic, Nvidia’s influence in the AI supply chain makes such comments hard to ignore. 3
Lenovo said it is pairing its liquid-cooled hybrid AI infrastructure with Nvidia’s computing platforms to help AI cloud providers bring data centers online in “weeks,” as it tries to expand beyond PCs into AI systems. Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing called the project “a new benchmark” for scalable AI factory design in a speech alongside Huang. 4
The Rubin platform bundles six chips — including a Vera CPU and Rubin GPU — and adds features such as “confidential computing,” security tech meant to protect data while it is being processed, The Verge reported. Rubin-based products are expected to roll out through partners in the second half of 2026, it said. 5
But the China trade remains a live risk. Nvidia still needs U.S. export licenses to ship H200 into China, and any delay — or a policy reversal — could hit expectations around 2026 growth and margins.
