MW Nvidia fears may be overdone, and this analyst offers a simple reason why
By Emily Bary
Nvidia's stock rallies as Morgan Stanley says Blackwell ramp could soon quash several investor worries
There are at least four issues clouding over shares of Nvidia Corp., which are down more than 10% from their record-high close. But Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore thinks soon only one thing will matter for the company: Blackwell.
That's the company's new chip, and by the second half of 2025, Moore expects "the only topic" for investors will be the strength of this ramping product.
"We have tended to be most enthusiastic on Nvidia when the near-term data points appear mixed, but underlying dynamics are very strong," he wrote Friday. "We think we are approaching that point now. We think there are a number of concerns here, some of which are overstated, some of which are anxiety inducing short term but we believe irrelevant longer term."
Moore went on to unpack the four biggest anxieties for Nvidia $(NVDA)$ investors now, one of which concerns Hopper, the company's older chip family. "This is a non issue, in our view, but there are likely to be noisy headlines in early 2025 that Nvidia builds are coming down," he wrote.
It makes sense why builds would slow further, he noted: "At some point, building H200s," which is part of the Hopper lineup, "takes away valuable back end and HBM3e supply that is more productively used for Blackwell." HBM3e is a type of high-bandwidth memory product.
As for Blackwell, he wrote that "not every version of new Blackwell products is ready to ship at the same time." That's worth pointing out because he's "hearing anxiety about some of the types that aren't ready."
Moore added that he's not "discounting" timing differences but expects that "all of the Blackwells should get sold, even if this drives allocation from one customer to another."
There's also been some fear about heightened competition from makers of application-specific integrated circuits, including Broadcom Inc. $(AVGO)$ and even Amazon.com Inc. $(AMZN)$ Following an upbeat growth forecast from Broadcom, investors have spent the past week or so nervous about the potential for ASICs to gain a bigger share of the artificial-intelligence accelerator market next year. But Moore has a different take on the situation.
Read: Why Broadcom's stock is this analyst's top chip pick for 2025, with 37% upside
"In 2025, we believe that the biggest users of ASICs will actually see purchasing shift back towards GPUs, based on conversations with those customers," he wrote.
Admittedly, longer term, "it remains to be seen" how the market will shake out, Moore said. It can be tough to make forecasts for future products not out yet. "But the capabilities introduced in Blackwell raise the bar materially," he added.
See also: Nvidia's stock claws back as this analyst tries to quell a big fear
Finally, there are worries about scaling, Moore said: "The key technologists driving spending in the largest [artificial general intelligence] 'arms race' cluster build-outs are seeing benefit to scaling out cluster sizes, but the financial backers in venture capital or enterprise cloud are raising questions about ROI for those models," or the returns on investment.
While he "can't rule out a consolidation in that portion of the market" come calendar 2026, Moore also thinks Nvidia has rolled out technology recently that looks to make big clusters more efficient.
That fear, and the one about ASICs, "may be with us for a while," Moore conceded, "but Nvidia can certainly make us feel better about them." Meanwhile, he thinks concerns about Blackwell product timing and Hopper build slowdowns could "completely disappear" in the second half of next year.
And thinking big picture, Moore still expects Nvidia to see faster revenue growth next year than Broadcom or Advanced Micro Devices Inc. $(AMD)$
Nvidia's stock is up 2% in morning action Friday but down 10.7% from its closing high achieved in early November.
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-Emily Bary
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December 20, 2024 11:07 ET (16:07 GMT)
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