Nvidia shares climbed about 5% on Monday to $222.16, shrugging off reports that CEO Jensen Huang won't be part of President Donald Trump's upcoming state visit to China. The gain came as investors focused on the company's strong core business rather than the political optics of Huang's absence from the high-profile trip.
Why the stock barely blinked
The reason for the market's calm is straightforward: China's contribution to Nvidia's advanced AI accelerator revenue has already evaporated. Huang himself said the company's market share for those chips in China has fallen to essentially zero under U.S. export restrictions. Analyst models and current valuations assume no meaningful revenue from restricted chips sold into the Chinese market. So whether Huang is in Beijing or Santa Clara makes no difference to the bottom line.
What does matter to investors is Nvidia's recent revenue strength and the unbroken demand from hyperscale data-center builders. Those buyers — the big cloud and AI companies — keep ordering chips at a pace that has pushed Nvidia's stock up sharply over the past year. Monday's move was just the latest leg higher.
The confusion over who was invited
The trip itself is scheduled for May 13–15, 2026, with formal meetings on May 14–15. Trump's delegation will include Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, both confirmed attendees. Elon Musk and Apple's Tim Cook are expected to join as well.
But Nvidia's place on that list got muddled. A source familiar with the planning told reporters that Huang was not invited to join the trip, contradicting an earlier Reuters report that named Nvidia among the invited companies. It's not clear whether the earlier report was mistaken or whether plans changed. Nvidia has not commented publicly on the discrepancy.
The export restrictions aren't going anywhere soon. The Biden-era rules that cut off Nvidia's top-end AI chips to China remain in place under Trump. Nvidia has been selling lower-performance chips that comply with the rules, but those products generate a fraction of the revenue the banned ones once did. Huang's comments suggest the company has accepted that China's advanced AI chip market is, for now, closed to it.
Investors will be watching for any new developments from Trump's Beijing meetings that might affect semiconductor trade policy. But for a company that just posted blowout earnings and sees no letup in demand from its biggest customers, a missed invitation to a state dinner isn't moving the needle.
