Nvidia shares surged to a fresh all-time high on May 13, climbing roughly 2.7% to close around $226 and briefly pushing the company’s market capitalization above $5.5 trillion, after President Donald Trump confirmed that CEO Jensen Huang had boarded Air Force One for a high-profile summit in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Huang joined the delegation as a last-minute addition, traveling to Alaska to board Air Force One during a stopover Tuesday night. He had spent nearly a year lobbying officials in both Washington and Beijing for permission to resume significant AI chip sales into China, a market that previously accounted for at least 20 percent of Nvidia’s data center revenue before export restrictions sharply curtailed those sales.
The stock’s move reflected investor optimism that Huang’s presence alongside the president could accelerate regulatory progress on chip exports. Bank of America raised its Nvidia price target to $320 from $300 on the same day, citing an updated forecast for the global AI data center market, which the bank now projects will reach approximately $1.7 trillion by 2030.
The export-control backdrop driving the rally is intricate. In January, the Trump administration approved the export of Nvidia’s H200 chip — a less advanced model designed to comply with U.S. national security requirements — to Chinese buyers, contingent on third-party chip evaluations, a 25-percent U.S. government revenue-sharing arrangement, and restrictions preventing military end-use. China’s government, however, had not yet formally approved any purchases as of the trip’s departure date, leaving Nvidia’s China revenue at effectively zero for multiple consecutive quarters. Nvidia’s CFO had told investors the company had not yet seen any revenue generated from those government-approved H200 sales.
The stakes are significant. Huang has characterized China as a roughly $50 billion opportunity for AI semiconductor sales. U.S. export controls blocked Nvidia from selling the H20 — a chip it had developed specifically for the Chinese market — beginning last April, a restriction the company said would cost it $8 billion in second-quarter revenue alone. Nvidia subsequently stopped including China in its forward revenue guidance, calling any easing a potential bonus rather than a base-case assumption.
For South Carolina’s expanding data center economy, the diplomatic backdrop carries direct financial weight. A proposal for a $2.8 billion data center campus in Spartanburg County — which, if approved, would rank as one of the largest single investments in state history — is among the projects that would depend on the next-generation Nvidia accelerator chips that sit at the center of every major hyperscale AI build. Duke Energy, which serves the Upstate region, unveiled a $103 billion capital spending plan earlier this year to meet surging AI and data center power demand across its service territory, with Spartanburg County’s proximity to I-85 and the Port of Greer’s Inland Port making it an active site for hyperscale siting discussions.
BMW Manufacturing‘s Spartanburg plant — the company’s largest production facility globally and a cornerstone of South Carolina’s manufacturing economy — is also tracking the Nvidia-China dynamic closely. BMW conducted a successful 10-month humanoid robotics pilot at Plant Spartanburg in 2025 using AI-powered Figure robots, helping build more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles. AI-driven automation of this kind runs on the same class of Nvidia GPU infrastructure that is now the subject of export negotiations in Beijing. Any meaningful improvement in Nvidia’s ability to supply and price those chips globally would ripple through the AI-manufacturing buildout that Upstate South Carolina is actively pursuing.
The Beijing summit is the most direct interaction between Nvidia’s leadership and Chinese policymakers since U.S.-China trade tensions escalated in 2025. Trump publicly praised Huang in effusive terms upon announcing the CEO’s participation, describing a broader goal of persuading Chinese leadership to allow American technology firms to operate more freely in the Chinese market. Whether Huang’s presence yields concrete export approvals remains uncertain; administration officials had previously intervened to block exports of Nvidia’s most advanced chips, and China’s state-directed data center procurement shifted toward domestic chip suppliers during the restriction period.
