Nvidia Corp. ranks as the fifth most valuable U.S. company by market capitalization after recently soaring into trillion-dollar territory, and the chip maker could have its sights set much higher.
Shares of Nvidia
NVDA,
have surged 194% so far this year, and they’re up 37% over the past month. With that backdrop, Evercore ISI analyst acknowledges the stock could face some “consolidation” in the near term, but he also sees massive opportunity in the future.
There’s “still PLENTY of runway ahead – where we would actually not be surprised to see NVDA trading as the most valuable company over the next couple of years as generative AI continues its proliferation and drives acceleration in more servers over time,” he wrote in a note to clients Tuesday, as he boosted his price target on the stock to $550 from $500. Muse viewed Nvidia shares as a “top pick” and had an outperform rating on them.
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Nvidia, with its fresh $1 trillion-plus valuation, has sparked a debate about “hype vs. reality,” Muse commented. He and his team “are very much of the view the that trends we are seeing today are reality and we remain just at the very tip of the generative AI iceberg,” as the full potential of AI “has yet to even be conceived, and very importantly, NVDA is not standing still.”
Muse was encouraged by the company’s focus on building an ecosystem that will be “ubiquitous across workloads in the future,” and he expected that Nvidia will “remain the dominant force and primary beneficiary of this compute evolution.”
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Other analysts recently weighed in with upbeat views of Nvidia as well. “We continue to think NVDA’s full-stack ecosystem makes it the compute leader by far today in early innings of AI,” Jefferies analyst Mark Lipacis wrote Tuesday, highlighting commentary from a recent chat with Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress that signaled better visibility into customers’ AI interest.
Lipacis brought up his price target to $500 from $472 while keeping a buy rating.
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Nvidia “is still the best AI option,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon added in his own Tuesday report. The company’s data-center forecast “stunned” and he and his team “would take the over vs. the under on numbers as we go through the rest of the year.” Meanwhile, there’s an “enormous” and “early” opportunity for the company over the long haul.
Rasgon had a $475 price target and outperform rating on Nvidia shares.
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