MW Nvidia is back in the $3 trillion-market-cap club as the U.S. weighs Saudi chip deal

By Britney Nguyen

The Trump administration is reportedly making a deal to give Saudi Arabia access to advanced chips from companies like Nvidia and AMD

Nvidia Corp. is headed for a close that would have it surpass a $3 trillion market capitalization for the first time since February, as investors anticipate a boost from a U.S. chip deal with Saudi Arabia.

President Donald Trump is planning to unveil a deal that would give the Gulf nation more access to advanced chips from companies such as Nvidia $(NVDA)$ and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. $(AMD)$, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

The U.S. and Saudi governments are reportedly finalizing details of the agreement as Trump begins his visit to the Middle East. These issues include U.S. concerns that China - which is banned from U.S. advanced semiconductors - could still get the chips by intercepting physical shipments or accessing them through the cloud. U.S. companies are already required to have a license to sell AI chips to countries in the Middle East, partly due to those concerns. The U.S. has reportedly proposed controlling access to Saudi data centers that use U.S. chips as a solution.

Shares of Nvidia climbed 5% on Tuesday morning, pushing the chip maker to a market cap of $3.14 trillion. AMD was up 1.9% during morning trading.

To deal with the U.S.'s national security concerns, the U.S. and Saudi governments have reportedly discussed creating data embassies, where data centers will fall under foreign regulations rather than local laws around data protection. The data embassies could make Saudi Arabia an "attractive environment for foreign governments and private sector entities to develop and adopt such technologies for peaceful purposes and uses," according to a draft of the law, cited by Bloomberg.

Neither the U.S. Commerce Department nor the Saudi Press Agency immediately responded to a request for comment from MarketWatch.

The deal comes as the Trump administration prepares rules around the deployment of advanced chips abroad, after scrapping artificial intelligence rules introduced by the former Biden administration that would have controlled chip shipments to a wider range of countries and trading partners.

"The Biden AI rule is overly complex, overly bureaucratic and would stymie American innovation," the Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement previously shared with MarketWatch. "We will be replacing it with a much simpler rule that unleashes American innovation and ensures American AI dominance."

The Trump administration is also reportedly considering pulling back on restricting sales of Nvidia's chips to the United Arab Emirates.

A deal with Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and the wider region could give a lift to Nvidia, which was banned from selling its specially-designed H20 chips to China by the Trump administration in April. The company said in a regulatory filing that it expected charges of up to $5.5 billion in the fiscal first quarter from the rule targeting the chips, which were made to comply with existing U.S. export controls.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang announced a deal on Tuesday to sell chips to Saudi AI firm Humain for a data center that is expected to reach 500 megawatts. Huang discussed the deal at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in the nation's capital, Riyadh. The AI company is owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and will focus on building Arabic large language models, as well as AI infrastructure, including data centers.

-Britney Nguyen

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May 13, 2025 11:18 ET (15:18 GMT)

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