Nvidia’s efforts to broaden its customer base beyond American tech giants took a giant leap forward Tuesday, adding more fuel to the artificial intelligence chip giant’s share-price recovery. Nvidia’s explosive sales expansion over the past two-plus years has been largely driven by massive AI investments from fellow Club holdings Microsoft , Amazon and Meta Platforms as well as Google parent Alphabet . It’s a group of data-center operators often called “hyperscalers.” While these companies are still spending, Nvidia has increasingly courted a wider range of customers, particularly those outside the U.S., to diversify its revenue stream and stoke additional growth in the coming years. Enter Saudi Arabia. At a business summit Tuesday in Riyadh, which President Donald Trump attended, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company will sell more than 18,000 of its cutting-edge Blackwell AI chips to Humain, a new AI startup owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Over the next five years, Humain said it expects to build data centers with up to 500 megawatts of capacity that use several hundred thousand of Nvidia’s AI chips. For context, a data center with 200 megawatts of capacity is “considered normal,” a report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. said last year. “Turns out we have another hyperscaler,” Jim Cramer said on Tuesday’s Morning Meeting, in an attempt to quantify the impact of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive AI spending plans in its efforts to diversify its economy away from oil. Shares of Nvidia jumped more than 6% on Tuesday to nearly $131 apiece. That extends the stock’s blistering rally to more than 37% since its lowest close of the year on April 4, which came after a brutal two-day sell-off in response to Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs. Nvidia’s market capitalization has topped $3 trillion once again and passed fellow Club name Apple as the second most valuable firm. Microsoft is No. 1. To be sure, Nvidia is still below its pre-DeepSeek close on Jan. 24 of $142.62 per share. Other Club stocks that benefit from AI data center construction, such as Eaton and the newly initiated GE Vernova , also rose on Tuesday. In fact, as part of Saudi Arabia’s promise to Trump to invest $600 billion in the U.S., the kingdom agreed to buy $14 billion worth of GE Vernova’s gas turbines and energy solutions. NVDA YTD mountain Nvidia’s year-to-date stock performance. For years, Nvidia’s Huang has talked up the financial potential of “sovereign AI,” a term used to describe a country building its own computing infrastructure to develop AI applications that incorporate their local customs and culture. The Club started to highlight this opportunity in late 2023 , and it’s picked up steam since then. Last year, Huang announced splashy AI initiatives in several countries, including Indonesia, India and Japan. Nvidia’s global push ran into a roadblock in January, when the Biden administration, in its waning days, unveiled a controversial rule that sought to further restrict the number of countries where the company’s AI chips could freely be sent. The Biden administration’s previous attempts primarily focused on China and some countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia . The so-called AI diffusion rule, however, was shelved by the Trump administration last week , just days before it was set to take effect. The Trump White House has said it will replace it with a “simpler” policy, though details are still scant on what form that will take. Under the now-scrapped Biden policy, Saudi Arabia would have faced a cap on the amount of AI computing power it could obtain without an export license. The developments Tuesday are the latest twist in Nvidia’s complicated geopolitical story during the second Trump administration. As Trump has shaken up global trade and drummed up investments in the U.S., Nvidia has sometimes found itself on the losing end — consider the tougher China export rules in April and tariff uncertainty in general. That’s around the time Jim recommended booking some profits in Nvidia to protect against any more negative Trump actions. At other times, it was on the winning end — like with the Stargate Project joint venture in January , the AI diffusion rule changes, and Tuesday’s agreement with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. For its part, Nvidia in mid-April said it plans to make up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. over the next four years — an announcement certainly meant to please Trump, and potentially minimize the effects of any semiconductor-specific tariffs that the White House has pledged to implement. Nvidia may benefit from more Trump actions in the future. The Trump administration is also considering a deal with the United Arab Emirates that would allow the Gulf nation to eventually secure more than a million AI chips from Nvidia, CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos confirmed Tuesday, citing a familiar with the matter. Bloomberg News first reported the news. The bottom line is Nvidia’s customer pool is getting deeper — something investors have long wanted to see — and policy changes from the Trump administration are making that broadening possible in a big way. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA, MSFT, META, AMZN, GEV and ETN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. 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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang attends an ‘Investing in America’ event held by U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
Nvidia’s efforts to broaden its customer base beyond American tech giants took a giant leap forward Tuesday, adding more fuel to the artificial intelligence chip giant’s share-price recovery.
