Seaport Research’s Jay Goldberg has some bullish ideas for 2026 — but none are as high-conviction as his longstanding bearish call on Nvidia.
That stance has garnered some attention this year, even as it hasn’t panned out. Since Goldberg launched coverage of Nvidia with a sell rating in late April, the stock has advanced 62%.
Nonetheless, when Seaport analysts submitted their top picks for 2026, Goldberg went with shorting Nvidia.
The artificial-intelligence trade, which has experienced volatility in recent weeks, “is getting a little long in the tooth,” Goldberg told MarketWatch. While Nvidia’s revenues and shares have skyrocketed due to its position powering the current AI boom, “it’s just getting harder and harder for their customers to afford” Nvidia’s offering, Goldberg said.
The bear case, he said, is “as simple as that.”
Capital expenditures at Nvidia’s top customers such as Meta Platforms and Alphabet are getting “massive,” Goldberg noted, but “it’s a very narrow pool of customers who are doing all this spending.” Eventually, “it’s just natural for them to sort of reassess why they are spending so much.”
At the same time, these customers are ramping up efforts to develop custom chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia, Goldberg said, and he expects some of those chip programs to come to fruition next year.
The heightening enthusiasm for custom chips has driven momentum for Broadcom, which develops application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, alongside its customers. The release of Google’s Gemini 3 model in November, for example, not only reaffirmed investor confidence in Alphabet’s AI opportunity but served as a boost to Broadcom, too.
Gemini 3 was trained on Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, which it has codeveloped with Broadcom for more than a decade.
Goldberg’s bullish view of Broadcom has panned out this year, with the stock rising 78% since he initiated coverage in late April. While Goldberg still has a buy rating on Broadcom shares and thinks the custom-chip maker will “continue to do well,” he told MarketWatch that he is “more convicted” in his negative view of Nvidia and the idea that the company is set up for challenges going forward.
Advanced Micro Devices is another option for customers, having long been seen as Nvidia’s closest competitor in the chip space, though markedly behind. Both Nvidia and AMD design graphics processing units, which compete with ASICs.
Some of AMD’s products are “not as good as Nvidia’s, but if you factor in that they’re cheaper and you sort of do the math that you get just as much compute per dollar as you do with Nvidia, suddenly AMD starts to look much more interesting as an alternative,” Goldberg said.
Goldberg started off with a bullish view of AMD’s stock but switched to a hold stance in a Sept. 4 report. While the stock had gained 69% over the course of his bullish call, the downgrade proved premature, with the stock tacking on another 28% in gains since then.
That said, Goldberg thinks AMD’s “story is still a couple of years out.”
The Nvidia web
Goldberg is also concerned about the intertwined relationships between Nvidia and its customers.
Cloud-infrastructure provider CoreWeave said in September that it had entered a new order form with Nvidia that would have the chip maker buy back compute capacity that it doesn’t sell. Under the existing agreement between the companies from April 2023, when data-center capacity “is not fully utilized by [CoreWeave’s] own customers, Nvidia is obligated to purchase the residual unsold capacity” until April 2032, CoreWeave said in a Securities and Exchange Commissionreport.
“Accounting-wise, there’s lots of ways you can describe it, but effectively it’s a discount,” Goldberg said.
Goldberg pointed to Nvidia’s latest earnings report in November, where the company reported that its cloud-service agreements had doubled from the previous year. As of October 26, Nvidia said its multiyear commitments were $26 billion — up from $11.3 billion in the third quarter of 2025. While $6.3 billion of that is from CoreWeave, Goldberg said, the remaining increase is from unknown customers.
Nvidia said in its 10-Q filing that some of that capacity “may be reduced, terminated or sold to others by the [cloud service providers], in which case our commitments will be reduced.”
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