Media reports that the U.S. has signed off on sales to China for one of Nvidia's more advanced chips used for artificial intelligence applications helped shares of the chip maker land another record close on Thursday.
It comes as CEO Jensen Huang is attending a summit in Beijing with other tech and business executives at the invitation of President Donald Trump.
But while the move is "an incremental positive" for Nvidia, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst C.J. Muse told Barron's, its implications go beyond the reported sales of the chip to 10 Chinese firms. What really matters is that the U.S. is enabling China to build on a U.S. made platform. That is a "tremendous positive," Muse said.
"Our preference, from the U.S. Government perspective, should be the world developing AI on a U.S. based platform, not a China based platform as they are doing today," he added.
Other analysts were equally muted on the direct revenue impact for Nvidia. "I think it's prudent to see evidence of actual orders before starting to model out a China revenue opportunity," William Blair's Sebastian Naji said.
If the reports are confirmed, the deal would "represent upside for Nvidia," since most analysts aren't currently modeling China revenue for the company into their estimates, Morningstar's Brian Colello added.
Trump first gave Nvidia the nod to sell the high-end H200 chips to China back in December, with the caveat that the sales had to be "under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security."
The reality is that the those sales have yet to materialize, in part because of the hoops Nvidia had to jump through to meet Trump's conditions and in part because China encouraged domestic companies to buy from other Chinese companies instead.
In its last earnings report in February, Nvidia confirmed that while the U.S. government had licensed shipments of "small amounts of H200 products to specific China-based customers," Nvidia had "not generated any revenue under the H200 licensing program, and do not yet know whether any imports will be allowed into China." It added that any shipments had to be inspected by the U.S., which would also receive a 25% share of those sales.
Nvidia and the White House didn't respond to a request for comment. Neither did several tech companies who were reportedly on the list of licensees, including Alibaba, Tencent, and Lenovo.
Nvidia shares closed up 4.4% at $235.75 for their sixth record closing high of the year.
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