Nvidia is looking for something to fuel its latest assault on new share-price highs. This week's summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping might be just what it needs.
The chip maker's shares were up 1.1% at $224.65 in premarket trading Monday. The stock is up 19% this year so far coming into the session but has fallen back from its record closing high of $235.74, reached on May 14.
The dream scenario for Nvidia is that Trump and Xi strike a deal on artificial-intelligence development that will fully unblock sales of its hardware to China.
"The United States has decided, and I'm very supportive, that we provide Nvidia's best technology to American companies first," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with CBS News on Friday. However, Huang added that he disagreed with a blanket ban on selling chips to Chinese companies and said American suppliers "ought to compete" in global markets.
The Trump administration previously said it would allow Nvidia to ship its H200 AI chips to approved customers in China. The H200 is not as powerful as Nvidia's current Blackwell AI chips and would effectively be several generations behind its coming Vera Rubin hardware. Nvidia has agreed to pass on a 25% cut of any such sales to the U.S. government.
Despite the H200 chip's limitations, Chinese companies would be willing to buy around 1.5 million of the processors, representing roughly $30 billion in revenue, according to KeyBanc analyst John Vinh. Nvidia estimates China represents a $50 billion total addressable market for its chips.
However, the block has come from Beijing, which has only allowed relatively small shipments so far, wary of leaving its domestic AI ecosystem dependent on a foreign supplier. Chinese authorities allowed domestic companies ByteDance and Tencent to receive around 10,000 of Nvidia's H200 processors each, the Financial Times reported in August, citing people familiar with the matter.
Huang is expected to attend the state dinner Trump is hosting for Xi on Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal. Huang normally has the president on his side when it comes to AI but securing major shipments to China would likely require the summit to end with a major deal on AI cooperation between Beijing and Washington.
Meanwhile, Nvidia executives are still benefiting from the company's huge success. CFO Colette Kress sold 34,918 shares on Sept. 17, worth around $7.65 million, according to a filing. The transactions were conducted under a 105b-1 trading plan, which is triggered when predetermined conditions such as stock price or date are met.
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