New York, January 7, 2026, 07:10 EST — Premarket
Nvidia (NVDA.O) was down about 0.5% in premarket trading at $187.24 on Wednesday after CEO Jensen Huang said investors should watch for purchase orders — not a formal Chinese announcement — to gauge whether local customers can import the company’s H200 data-center chips used to run and train AI models. Reuters
The comments land as investors test how far the new-year run in AI-linked stocks can stretch, after chip and memory names drove Wall Street higher a day earlier and pushed the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor Index to a record. “I think we’re going to have a very strong earnings season for Big Tech,” said Jed Ellerbroek, a portfolio manager at Argent Capital, pointing to expectations that capital spending, or capex, gets revised higher. Reuters
Futures tied to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq edged lower early Wednesday as traders braced for labor-market updates that can shift expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts — a key swing factor for richly valued growth stocks. “Further weakness would support rate-cut expectations,” Swissquote Bank senior analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya wrote, adding that stronger figures could quickly revive hawkish bets. Reuters
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, China’s Lenovo said it has teamed up with Nvidia to help AI cloud providers bring data centers online faster, pairing its liquid-cooled infrastructure with Nvidia computing platforms. “Lenovo AI Cloud Gigafactory with NVIDIA sets a new benchmark for scalable AI factory design,” Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said. Reuters
Huang’s CES message has also rippled through the AI supply chain. Heating and cooling-related stocks fell on Tuesday after he said Nvidia’s next-generation chips could cut data-center cooling needs and that “no water chillers are necessary for data centres,” while Barclays analysts cautioned the remarks were dramatic but worth heeding “given the primacy of Nvidia to the whole AI ecosystem.” Reuters
Other AI chip names were mixed before the bell, with AMD (AMD.O) down about 3.1%, Broadcom (AVGO.O) little changed and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s U.S.-listed shares (TSM.N) up about 1.6%. Server maker Super Micro Computer (SMCI.O) rose about 1.5%.
On the calendar, the ADP National Employment Report is due later Wednesday, ahead of government data releases this week. The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — JOLTS, which tracks job openings, hires and quits — is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. ET, while Nvidia is slated to report fiscal fourth-quarter results on Feb. 25. ADP Employment Report
But the upside case for AI bellwethers still hinges on two moving targets: whether U.S. export licensing opens a clearer path for Nvidia’s H200 shipments into China, and whether incoming labor data cools enough to keep rate-cut hopes alive. A hotter set of jobs numbers that pushes yields higher can compress valuations quickly, even when company demand signals stay firm.
