Nvidia eyes $4T valuation: 4 catalysts moving the stock forward

Yahoo

18 hours ago

Nvidia (NVDA) stock is on the move again, trading at record highs as the company nears a $4 trillion market cap.
Yahoo Finance Technology Editor Dan Howley joins Market Catalysts to explain what's driving the rally, from soaring demand for GPUs to sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) investments and Nvidia's growing footprint in robotics.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Catalysts here.
Trading at record highs, Nvidia's market cap is nearing $4 trillion overtaking Microsoft. And Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research predicts, it won't stop there.
And I think investors are starting to recognize. We haven't even seen the biggest growth driver yet of AI. Not just on enterprise and the use cases but on the consumer side and ultimately, autonomous and robotics. And I just this is in my view, it's not just 4 trillion. I mean we're going to be looking at a $5 trillion dollar market cap in Nvidia.
And here with more on the catalyst continuing to push Nvidia stock higher, we've got Yahoo Finance tech editor, Dan Howley. Dan, what do we know?
Yeah, Brad, there's a number of things going on here. First, I want to shout out Dan Ives for that New York Mets pillow in the background. But there's a number of things going on around Nvidia that are really helping to power the stock. And let's just start off with the the big one and that's the continued investment from hyperscalers in their data center. So we've heard more about things like the Project Stargate from OpenAI as well as Oracle. Nvidia is a big part of that. You know, Microsoft continues to purchase these these GPUs, Google, Amazon, Meta, XAI, they're all gearing up and buying these and continuing to do so. And that's despite the fact that we were talking earlier in the year about the tariffs potentially having an impact on the build out. Maybe they will, maybe they won't change their path, but they seem to just be continuing to move forward and spending. One of the other things that's worth pointing out is Sovereign AI. That's something that Project Stargate in Saudi Arabia is part of when you look at how Nvidia was received at GTC Paris, a lot of talk about Sovereign AI and getting Europe's AI up to a caliber similar to what you can see around the US and China. So a lot of countries are leaning further into the idea of having their own Sovereign AI, not necessarily relying on the AI capabilities of other countries. There's also the broader push towards powering inferencing. At first when the the big kind of generative AI boom kicked off with chat GPT, it was all about training. And that's basically teaching these models what to do, what they they'll predict next, how to write, you know, based on millions of books, generate images, things along those lines. Now it's about inferencing. It's about taking those models and putting them to work. And so the original thinking was, well, the the the the training uses a lot of power. You need heavy duty GPUs for that, not inferencing. The opposite's proven to be true where you need those heavy duty GPUs to continue to power the inferencing because it provides a better answer and better response from those those bots. And then the last thing is Nvidia's continued belief in physical AI. Now, that means basically robots and that includes self-driving cars. And so they have a large footprint there in the self-driving car space, but then also Jensen has been pushing this idea of actual robots working side by side with people in factories at first and then down the line in the future maybe having them in your home. That's not going to come for for quite a while, but Nvidia is well positioned here because A, they have a small computer that they can use that powers some of these robots. I've seen a number of them in person. The other is that they have the capability to train them up. So using a virtual world where they teach the robot how to kind of get around and then implement that into the actual robot in the real world. So going from virtual to real and then sorting out the bugs from there. So there's a lot of positives around Nvidia. Obviously, since it's such a big name stock, there will continue to be ups and downs, but this is why it seems to be on that upward trajectory generally.
And so that upward trajectory, a lot of the analysts that are covering the name believe that it could be the first company and be on the you know, it's in the poll position essentially to get to $4 trillion dollars. We've even heard upside of $6 trillion dollars from some of the most bullish calls out there on Wall Street. What do you think the broader kind of analyst consensus is really settling around right now, Dan?
I think it's really the fact that look, Nvidia is still the go-to for these kind of capabilities, right? They're the ones that build these GPUs, are the ones that offer the software that are being used most often. And yes, there are competitors. AMD is continuing to develop and kind of work to catch its stride alongside Nvidia. We have Nvidia's own customers, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, working on and deploying, already using their own AI chips. The thing is while they may use their AI chips, their customers, their cloud customers, still want access to Nvidia's GPUs. And so they have to offer Nvidia GPUs to ensure that their customers are getting what they want and continue to return. So I think that's where a lot of that kind of, you know, exuberance around Nvidia comes from is they are still the chip leader despite the fact that there are continuing threats and growing threats from not just their ordinary competitors, but the people that they actually sell directly to. And by the way, just quickly, Nvidia's also doing the flip side of that. You know, cloud providers allow you to get access to Nvidia's GPUs. Nvidia's also working with companies to provide cloud access to its hardware as well. So it's kind of like a, you know, look, we're we're business partners or pals, but at the end of the day, we're working out for ourselves.
Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to be watching closely to see within these trade deals, especially US and China, where the IP potentially does continue to be something that Nvidia has to think about. That has certainly been one of the hangups here we do know. Dan, thanks so much for breaking this down.