New York, Feb 12, 2026, 10:10 EST — Regular session
Nvidia (NVDA.O) climbed 0.7% to $191.36 during Thursday morning hours. Shares started the session at $193.00 and topped out at an intraday high of $193.55.
Nvidia now serves as the bellwether for data-centre AI spending, given its GPUs dominate the training and deployment of AI models. The stock tends to move quickly on any hint of shifts in demand, supply chains, or export rules.
Much of that impact comes in sideways. Spending plans from upstart “neocloud” outfits—smaller players leasing GPU power—hint at it. The same goes for the supply chain around high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked memory paired with AI accelerators.
Nebius Group flagged a surge in quarterly capex, plowing more money into AI chips and expanding data centers running on Nvidia gear. “Demand … continues to outpace supply,” CEO Arkady Volozh told shareholders in a letter. 1
Nebius has lined up a 240-megawatt data center project outside Lille in northern France, set to rank among Europe’s biggest once complete. The first stage should go live by late summer. CBRE estimates that building out AI data centers costs anywhere from $10 million to $14 million per megawatt, putting the total price tag for this facility firmly in the multibillion-dollar bracket. 2
Samsung Electronics has begun delivering its latest HBM4 chips to undisclosed clients, aiming to close in on competitors in the race to provide essential parts for Nvidia’s AI accelerators. Song Jai-hyuk, CTO of the company’s chip division, described customer response so far as “very satisfactory.” 3
Policy jitters lingered. Ro Khanna, the lead Democrat on a key U.S. House panel dealing with China, signaled he’s fine with allowing sales of Nvidia’s older Hopper chips to China, but doesn’t want to see newer models exported. “We certainly shouldn’t be sending them Rubins. We shouldn’t be sending them Blackwells,” Khanna told reporters. 4
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told lawmakers the rules governing Nvidia’s H200 chip sales to China are “very detailed,” saying Nvidia “must live with” those limitations. Asked about trusting China to stick to the restrictions, Lutnick pointed to President Donald Trump. 5
But there’s also the steady creep of competition to consider — not only from other chipmakers, but from clients aiming to develop chips themselves. According to Reuters, TikTok parent ByteDance is working on an AI inference chip, the kind used for generating model responses, and has entered discussions with Samsung about manufacturing. ByteDance, however, disputed the accuracy of that report. 6
Moves to develop their own silicon could chip away at Nvidia’s dominance, at least around the edges, despite the fact that major customers remain big buyers of its GPUs. There’s also another wrinkle: U.S. export controls shape what’s allowed to reach China, and those rules bring fresh uncertainty.
Next up: Nvidia’s earnings. The chip giant will release its fourth-quarter and fiscal 2026 results on Feb. 25, with execs set to speak at 5 p.m. ET. Investors want numbers, sure, but they’re also hunting for signals on supply limits and clarity about Chinese shipments now that new licensing rules are in play. 7
