Nvidia's stock racks up new records. Why bulls say the party can keep going.

By Emily Bary

There's the potential for more beat-and-raise quarters, plus opportunity in sovereign AI, analysts say.

Add some more records to the books for Nvidia Corp.

Its stock (NVDA) rose 3.1% in Friday's session, bringing its weekly gains to 7.4%. In the process, the shares achieved their longest weekly winning streak on record, according to Dow Jones Market Data - as they advanced for the 11th week in a row.

Nvidia's stock finished Friday's session at a record all-time closing high of $942.89. That made for its first new record finish since March 7.

While some thought Nvidia's stock might come under pressure after the company's annual GTC event, which took place earlier this week, the momentum has continued.

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"They are making their own weather and as long as they keep beating and raising (question will be not 'if,' but by 'how much'), [Nvidia] is likely to remain the most owned and favored bet for investors in tech and [semiconductors]" for the rest of the year, Mizuho desk-based analyst Jordan Klein wrote in a Friday note to clients.

Investors are asking him now what the stock's next major catalyst is. In his view, "it is more a waiting game for B100 shipping and how well H200 sales will be" ahead of the company's rollout of its Blackwell chip architecture, which it previewed at GTC.

Opinion: Nvidia shows it's still on track for AI dominance

UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri was upbeat as well, hiking his price target to $1,100 from $800 in a Thursday report. That note was titled: "The Only Chip Company That Can Create Its Own Mkt."

In Arcuri's view, Nvidia "sits on the cusp of an entirely new wave of demand from global enterprises and sovereigns." The company sees opportunity as nations build out sovereign AI, and Arcuri estimates that some of those countries could each end up as big as one large U.S. cloud customer.

He also weighed in on Nvidia's pricing commentary for its new chip lineup, as some have worried that the company was pricing the chips too low for the value they offer customers. Such concerns "are misguided," from his perspective.

"Blackwell has a generally greater emphasis on systems versus GPUs and margins will differ" depending on mix, he noted.

"Given the complexity of these systems, margins will naturally be lower in the early stages of Blackwell but this was also the case for Hopper," the company's current architecture. For that reason, "across the entire life cycle of Blackwell, we expect a very similar margin profile to Hopper," Arcuri continued.

Read: Broadcom's stock climbs as one bull calls it a 'world-class' AI play - for cheap

-Emily Bary

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03-22-24 1749ET

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