Nvidia shares surged to an all-time high of $236.46 on Thursday after the U.S. Department of Commerce cleared the company to sell its H200 AI accelerators to roughly 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com. The decision unwinds export controls that had shut China out of Nvidia’s most advanced hardware since October 2023.
Who gets the chips
The approvals cover direct purchases by Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com, with Lenovo and Foxconn authorized as distributors. The list includes around 10 Chinese firms, though the Commerce Department hasn’t named all of them. None of the chips have physically shipped yet — Beijing still needs to sign off on the transactions.
Why the reversal matters
Before the export curbs, China generated nearly a quarter of Nvidia’s revenue, peaking at roughly $8 billion a year. The October 2023 controls cut that flow close to zero. CEO Jensen Huang called President Trump’s China summit “one of the most important in human history,” a remark that underscores the high stakes of the market reopening.
Nvidia’s market value hit $5.52 trillion, overtaking silver as the world’s second-largest asset by aggregate value. The company now sits behind only the U.S. and China in terms of total economic size. Alphabet, by comparison, is less than 4% below the $5 trillion mark.
The missing piece
Traders see Chinese demand as the critical element missing from Nvidia’s data-center expansion story. The H200 is the company’s flagship AI accelerator, and access to the Chinese market could add billions back to the top line. But the pace of Chinese regulatory clearance will determine how quickly the policy reversal converts into reported revenue.
Beijing is still reviewing the transactions. No deliveries have taken place. The question now is whether AI hardware demand can keep widening the gap between technology valuations and physical commodities — or whether the Chinese review will slow Nvidia’s momentum.
