New York, January 7, 2026, 09:44 EST — Regular session
- Nvidia shares fell 0.5% in early trade after CEO Jensen Huang flagged uncertainty around China orders for H200 chips.
- The company is pitching its Vera Rubin platform as “in full production” after CES disclosures this week.
- Traders are watching U.S. labor data and Nvidia’s Feb. 25 results as the next tests.
Nvidia (NVDA.O) shares slipped 0.5% to $187.24 in early trading on Wednesday after Chief Executive Jensen Huang said any Chinese approval to import the company’s H200 chips would show up in purchase orders, not a formal announcement. Huang said demand from Chinese customers was “quite high,” while CFO Colette Kress said export license applications were moving but Nvidia still had no timeline for approvals. Reuters
The stock move came as traders took a breather after an AI-driven rally pushed the S&P 500 and the Dow to record closes on Tuesday, and attention swung to labor data. ADP said private payrolls rose by 41,000 in December, below estimates in a Reuters poll, and investors were waiting for U.S. job openings data after the open and the monthly payrolls report on Friday.
Huang used CES to lean into the next product cycle, telling the conference that Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform is in “full production” and should debut later this year. The six-chip setup is designed to improve the efficiency of generating “tokens” — the units of text that chatbots produce — and comes as Nvidia faces tougher competition in AI chips from rivals such as AMD and from customers like Alphabet’s Google. Reuters
A new tie-up with Lenovo added to the CES drumbeat. Lenovo said it will pair its liquid-cooled hybrid AI infrastructure with Nvidia computing platforms to help AI cloud providers cut data-center deployment time to “weeks” under an “AI Cloud Gigafactory” program. “Lenovo AI Cloud Gigafactory with NVIDIA sets a new benchmark for scalable AI factory design,” Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said in a speech alongside Huang. Reuters
Semiconductor shares were mixed early on Wednesday. AMD was down about 3.1%, while Intel traded up about 1.6%.
A Form 4 filed on Tuesday showed Nvidia principal accounting officer Donald F. Robertson Jr sold 80,000 shares on Jan. 2 for about $15.2 million, under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted in September.
But the near-term read-through is still about timing. If export licenses for H200 shipments slip, China revenue stays hard to pin down, and any sign that big cloud buyers are slowing spending tends to hit sentiment fast.
Next up: U.S. job openings later Wednesday and Friday’s payrolls report, which traders use to gauge the path for interest rates. Nvidia is due to report fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 financial results on Feb. 25.
