NEW YORK, Jan 7, 2026, 16:02 (EST) — After-hours
- Nvidia shares ended up about 0.9% on Wednesday, even after a report that Beijing told some firms to pause H200 orders.
- The company is waiting on U.S. export licenses to ship the chips to China, where demand has been a swing factor for sentiment.
- Next up: U.S. payrolls on Jan. 9 and Nvidia’s Feb. 25 results.
Nvidia Corp (NVDA) shares ended the day up about 0.9% at $188.92, after trading between $186.60 and $191.26, as investors digested a report that China has asked some domestic tech companies to halt orders for Nvidia’s H200 artificial-intelligence chips.
The tug-of-war matters because Nvidia is trying to reopen a lucrative channel into China at a time when U.S. export controls and Chinese industrial policy are both shifting. A pause, even a temporary one, risks turning a high-profile restart into another stop-start cycle.
The near-term trigger is regulatory, not engineering. Nvidia’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, said the U.S. government is “working feverishly” on license applications for H200 shipments, but the company still does not know when approvals will land. Export licenses are the government permits required to ship restricted technology. 1330 & 101.5 WHBL
Beijing’s thinking, as described in the report, is to stop companies from stockpiling U.S. chips before the government decides what it will allow, and it may require purchases of domestic AI chips. The Chinese Embassy in Washington said China was willing to maintain dialogue and cooperation to safeguard supply chains.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been telling investors to watch order flow instead of official statements. “It’s just going to be purchase orders,” Huang said at CES in Las Vegas, adding: “We’ve fired up our supply chain, and H200s are flowing through the line.” Reuters
At the same show, Huang said Nvidia’s next “Vera Rubin” computing platform is in “full production” and is expected to debut later this year, with a flagship server containing 72 graphics processing units and 36 central processors, Reuters reported. He said the systems can cut the cost of generating “tokens” — the basic units of text or data an AI model produces — by about 10 times versus the prior platform. Reuters
The stock move came as the broader “AI trade” returned to the driver’s seat on Wall Street, lifting the Nasdaq. “Investors have come into 2026 with a similar playbook to last year: Buy tech and forget about it,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive of Longbow Asset Management. Reuters
But the path from demand to revenue is still political. If Beijing tightens the screws on overseas chips or Washington stretches out license decisions, Nvidia could be stuck with a hot product and a slow doorway into China. Competition from rivals and big customers building their own silicon hangs over the cycle too.
A separate company filing showed Nvidia’s principal accounting officer, Donald F. Robertson Jr., sold blocks of stock on Jan. 2 under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, a pre-arranged program used to schedule trades.
What investors watch next is timing: any sign the U.S. approvals are moving, any follow-through from Beijing on domestic chip mandates, and the next big set of numbers — Nvidia’s fourth-quarter results on Feb. 25.
