Nvidia just achieved a $5 trillion valuation.
Although Nvidia (NVDA +2.09%) has been having a fantastic run in recent quarters, one of its biggest pain points has been China. Export restrictions prevented Nvidia from selling its high-performing chips in China for much of 2025. Just when it thought it had struck a deal with Washington, D.C., China’s government banned their use, citing national security concerns.
Sales in China accounted for 17% of Nvidia’s revenue in fiscal 2025, so the company’s ability to sell in Asia is a big deal. But now, President Donald Trump has given Nvidia hope, and shares of its stock have rocketed higher, pushing Nvidia to a $5 trillion market capitalization — a first for any company.
Here’s what happened, and what it means for Nvidia’s sales.
Image source: Nvidia.
Nvidia’s “super-duper chip”
During his trip to Asia, President Trump met officials from Japan and South Korea, but his meeting Thursday with China’s president, Xi Jinping, may have been the most consequential of the week’s trade negotiations, considering the size of both countries’ economies.
Talking with reporters before the meeting, Trump said that he might discuss Nvidia’s vaunted Blackwell chips with his Chinese counterpart during their negotiations, calling it “the super-duper chip.”
“That’s our country. We’re about 10 years ahead of anybody else in chips — in the highly sophisticated chips. I think we may be talking about that with President Xi,” Trump said.
That news sent Nvidia stock up more than 4% in morning trading, as shares topped $210. More noteworthy is that the surge sent Nvidia’s market cap past the $5 trillion mark just 112 days after it became the first company to reach $4 trillion. As of this writing, Nvidia shares are up 56% year to date.
Today’s Change
(2.09%) $4.24
Current Price
$206.73
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$4921B
Day’s Range
$206.35 – $211.34
52wk Range
$86.62 – $212.19
Volume
5.4M
Avg Vol
177M
Gross Margin
69.85%
Dividend Yield
0.00%
Where can Nvidia go from here?
First of all, it’s not at all certain that Trump’s negotiations with Xi will go anywhere. Trump reportedly walked away with a one-year reprieve on China’s threat to withhold rare-earth materials, as well as a commitment from Beijing to purchase 25 million metric tons of soybeans a year. But he acknowledged that Nvidia and its Blackwell chips didn’t come up between the two presidents after all.
However, Trump’s announcement to reporters on Air Force One brings some optimism for Nvidia in China. Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are the industry leader in powering high-level computing tasks, such as running artificial intelligence (AI) programs and training large language models (LLMs). They operate on Nvidia’s CUDA parallel computing platform that allows multiple processors to work on calculations at the same time to break down larger problems. Nvidia’s unique architecture provides a competitive advantage over other chipmakers — and the company (and Trump) seemingly want to keep that advantage over China’s Huawei and other foreign competitors.
Nvidia had wanted to sell H20 chips, which Nvidia had made specifically for the Chinese market to comply with U.S. export restrictions against advanced AI semiconductors. The H20 isn’t as powerful as Nvidia’s famed Hopper H100 chips, but they can run some AI workloads up to 20% faster. Nvidia took a $4.5 billion inventory charge in the first quarter of fiscal 2026.
Nvidia is reportedly developing a chip for China on the Blackwell architecture called B30A that would be more powerful than the H20 chip.
Nvidia’s revenues have been soaring even without China. In fiscal 2026’s Q2, Nvidia saw revenue of $46.7 billion, which was a 56% gain from the previous year. Data center revenue of $41.1 billion was the primary driver.
Nvidia also recently signed a deal with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to build in 10 gigawatts of AI data centers with Nvidia infrastructure, and took a $5 billion stake in Intel to manufacture central processing units (CPUs) with Nvidia’s high-speed interconnect technology, NVLink.
But if Nvidia can work its way back into China, that opens the door to even more profits. Before the export restriction and Beijing’s ban, Nvidia had an estimated 95% market share in China.
For investors, there’s reason for hope. That’s why Nvidia is now the world’s only company to ever reach a $5 trillion valuation.
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