NEW YORK, Jan 24, 2026, 09:34 (EST) — Market closed.
Shares of Nvidia Corporation rose on Friday after Bloomberg News reported Chinese officials told some of the country’s biggest tech firms they could prepare orders for the company’s H200 artificial intelligence chips. With U.S. markets shut on Saturday, traders head into Monday looking for any sign the prep work turns into a formal green light.
China has become a swing factor for Nvidia’s newest data-center chips. Investors treat every hint out of Beijing as a demand signal — or as a warning that sales could stay boxed in.
That matters now because next week brings a flood of results from the “Magnificent Seven” — the biggest U.S. tech stocks — and investors will listen for any change in data-center budgets. Nvidia often trades as a proxy for that spending.
Nvidia (NVDA.O) closed up $2.83, or about 1.5%, at $187.67 on Friday. The stock traded between $183.50 and $189.45 during the session.
Wall Street ended a volatile week with the Dow down 0.58% on Friday, while the S&P 500 was nearly flat and the Nasdaq rose 0.28%. Intel tumbled 17% after a downbeat forecast, but most megacap tech shares rose, and a Janus Henderson portfolio manager called it a “show-me” period for the AI trade. Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Shanghai on Saturday, a person briefed on the matter said, as the U.S. chip giant faces tougher scrutiny in China and rising competition from local rivals. Nvidia is waiting for Beijing to decide whether the H200 can be sold to Chinese customers, and customs agents have been told the chip is not permitted to enter China, though it was unclear whether that amounted to a formal ban or a temporary step.
The H200 is an advanced graphics-processing chip used in servers that train and run large AI models, and it sits near the top of Nvidia’s data-center line-up. Any clearer path for shipments to China would give investors another read on demand, not just for one product but for the broader AI buildout.
But the China story cuts both ways. If approvals drag or flip back the other way, Nvidia can face order whiplash and sharper competition in a market where politics can overrule price.
The calendar is busy even without fresh China headlines. Investors are widely expected to see the Federal Reserve hold rates steady next week, while strategists warn that stretched valuations leave little room for weak guidance — “the earnings bar had better be met,” Franklin Templeton strategist Chris Galipeau said. Reuters
For Nvidia, the next scheduled milestone is its fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 financial results on Feb. 25. Until then, traders are likely to treat any China update — and the tone from big cloud and consumer tech buyers — as the fast-moving catalysts for NVDA shares.
