Shares of Nvidia jumped just over 3% on Friday as investors positioned ahead of the company’s highly anticipated keynote at CES on January 5. Market participants have cited growing excitement around Chinese demand for the new H200 AI acceleration chips, which were certified for use in major cloud data centers late last year. The broader Nasdaq composite also strengthened, with the technology sector leading gains as traders returned from the New Year holiday. Analyst surveys indicate that more than half of hyperscale cloud operators plan to increase their orders for Nvidia’s H200 series by at least 20% in the first half of 2026, reflecting confidence in sustained enterprise AI deployment.

In December, Nvidia announced a landmark licensing agreement valued at approximately $20 billion with AI chip innovator Groq, securing rights to integrate Groq’s low-latency inference technology into its custom silicon roadmap. The deal brings key members of Groq’s engineering leadership into Nvidia’s AI chip division and accelerates development of specialized LPUs (Language Processing Units) alongside its flagship GPUs. Company executives have highlighted that inference workloads now represent over 30% of total AI compute demand, up from 18% a year ago, underscoring the strategic importance of diversifying beyond traditional training accelerators.

Nvidia headlined a raft of bullish analyst updates over the holiday week, with research firms outlining four key drivers for further gains: 1) Revenue growth momentum – year-to-date top-line is up 62% with fourth-quarter guidance calling for a 65% increase compared with a year earlier; 2) Resumption of China exports under a new licensing framework poised to contribute an incremental revenue uplift in the second quarter; 3) The rollout of next-generation Rubin (R100) GPU architecture, expected to deliver 50% better performance per watt than the current Hopper series; and 4) A valuation that has been repriced to approximately 25 times forward earnings, which analysts deem reasonable given consensus growth projections of over 100% for fiscal 2026 and 2027 combined.