NVIDIA shares climbed to a record $236.46 on Thursday after Washington cleared H200 chip exports to roughly 10 Chinese firms, lifting market value above $5.5 trillion.
Commerce Department Clears H200 Exports
The US Department of Commerce signed off on H200 purchases for around 10 Chinese companies, sources told Reuters in a report carried by CNBC and Bloomberg.
Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com lead the list of cleared buyers, while Lenovo and Foxconn received approval to act as distributors.
Each licensed customer can purchase up to 75,000 H200 units under the terms.
The ruling unwinds October 2023 export controls that effectively shut China out of NVIDIA's most advanced inventory. That market once delivered close to $8 billion in annual sales for the chipmaker.
Beijing is still reviewing the transactions and no physical shipments have left the United States. Chinese firms have pulled back after guidance from authorities in Beijing, Reuters said. The H200 ranks as NVIDIA's second-most powerful AI accelerator behind the Blackwell line.
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Huang Joins Beijing Summit
NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang joined US President Donald Trump in Beijing for the bilateral summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Huang described the meeting as "one of the most important summits in human history."
Trump personally called the NVIDIA chief after the executive was initially absent from the White House delegation list, and Huang boarded Air Force One in Alaska before continuing on to Beijing.
The trip marks the first visit by a sitting US president to China in nearly a decade.
Trade access for American firms, Taiwan and the war with Iran dominated the public agenda. Other US executives present included Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple's Tim Cook and BlackRock's Larry Fink.
NVIDIA Market Cap Tops $5.5 Trillion
Thursday's rally pushed NVIDIA's market capitalization past $5.52 trillion, with the stock gaining roughly 4% on the session, Yahoo Finance reported.
The chipmaker now stands as the world's most valuable publicly traded company by a wide margin.
Traders viewed Chinese demand as the missing piece in the data center expansion story. Licensed sales remain subject to a 25% revenue duty paid to the US government and physical inspection inside US territory before export.
NVIDIA first crossed the $4 trillion threshold in July 2025 and reached $5 trillion in late October.
Shares have climbed more than 14-fold since the end of 2022 on demand for AI training hardware from Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, along with model developers OpenAI and Anthropic.
A January rule from the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security first opened the H200 to case-by-case review after a presumption of denial. The H20, a less powerful chip developed for China after the 2023 controls, returned to the market in July 2025 under a separate arrangement.
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