Nvidia Stock Hits Record After U.S. Clears H200 Sales to China

The U.S. Department of Commerce on Thursday approved sales of NVIDIA’s H200 data-center AI accelerators to roughly 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com. Lenovo and Foxconn were cleared to act as distributors for the chips.

NVIDIA stock reached a closing record of $236.46 on the trading session following the announcement, and shares were about 5% higher from the opening price. The company’s market value climbed to roughly $5.69 trillion.

The H200 is NVIDIA’s current high-end accelerator for large-scale training and inference tasks in data centers. The Commerce Department approval removes export restrictions put in place in October 2023 that had effectively blocked China from access to NVIDIA’s most advanced accelerators.

Before the 2023 export controls, sales to the China region accounted for nearly a quarter of NVIDIA’s revenue and were worth about $8 billion a year for the company’s data-center products. After the controls, sales to the region fell close to zero.

No physical shipments have taken place so far because Chinese regulators are still reviewing individual transactions. U.S. clearance permits the sales, but Beijing’s approvals will determine when deliveries can occur and when related revenue appears in NVIDIA’s results.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called the recent U.S.-China summit ‘one of the most important in human history.’

Approvals for distributors such as Lenovo and Foxconn provide channels to integrate the H200 into servers and cloud infrastructure once Chinese regulatory clearances are complete.