MW Nvidia's big GTC event is on deck, and the company faces a very high bar this year
By Britney Nguyen and Emily Bary
Nvidia 'is having a harder time moving the needle' these days, one analyst notes
Nvidia's Jensen Huang will give a keynote presentation at GTC on Monday.
The Super Bowl for Nvidia fans is just around the corner. But analysts aren't so sure that the event will be able to breathe new life into Nvidia's stock.
Earlier this year, some on Wall Street were looking to GTC, the annual developer event that kicks off on Monday, as a major stock catalyst. The thinking was that Nvidia (NVDA) would save not only major product announcements, but also major financial announcements, for its big San Jose conference.
But while the company is still expected to deliver a slew of updates, it's "hard to see [Nvidia] being able to provide thesis-altering commentary that creates a breakout for the stock," UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri said in a note last week. Shares have fallen 3% so far this year, and they moved lower even in the wake of last month's blowout earnings report.
Jay Goldberg, a Seaport Research analyst who's the lone bear on Nvidia's stock, said the company "is having a harder time moving the needle" lately. One issue is that the company's near-term growth prospects are somewhat held in check by supply constraints.
"For the past four years, Nvidia's GTC developer event has been the center of excitement for the entire AI complex," he wrote in a note to clients. "Beyond all the announcements (new roadmaps, new partnerships) the show also seems to spark people's imagination about what AI will accomplish. As exciting as all that will be, the outlook for semis this year will need more than vision."
Don't miss: Nvidia investors banking on a big GTC stock bump may be disappointed
What should Nvidia investors expect on the product front when CEO Jensen Huang takes the stage for his keynote at 11 a.m. Pacific time on Monday? Arcuri said Wall Street will be looking for more details on Nvidia's roadmap all the way through its Feynman architecture, which is what follows the upcoming Vera Rubin platform.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported late last month that Nvidia could be preparing for the debut of a brand-new chip platform, leveraging technology from Groq, with which it recently struck a $20 billion licensing deal. While Nvidia is a powerhouse provider of graphics processing units, Groq makes language processing units that could hold appeal as AI moves more toward inference use cases.
"We think this update will help sentiment around [Nvidia's] AI inference positioning, where some investors have been skeptical," BNP Paribas analyst David O'Connor said in a note.
See more: This could be Nvidia's next big move, with the stock in search of a positive catalyst
And Nvidia is getting more active with central processing units as well. Arya said in a Monday note that he could also see Nvidia making an announcement with Intel $(INTC)$ for custom x86-based CPUs - a move that he said could help extend its adoption both in enterprise data centers and in consumer electronics.
The company is increasingly selling customers on a full suite of products. Along those lines, the Nvidia could further showcase its software advantage with its full-stack offering that combines its chips, networking and storage into what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls an AI factory, according to Arcuri.
Arcuri said this approach "shifts performance discussions away from standalone GPU generations and toward how workloads are decomposed, orchestrated and scaled across the full system." That validates Nvidia's platform approach, he added, and helps to fend off competition from Advanced Micro Devices $(AMD)$ and Broadcom $(AVGO)$.
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya said one focus for investors will be Nvidia's proprietary optical technology in its scale-up networking. Nvidia's NVLink scale-up technology connects multiple chips to work as one chip, therefore enabling higher bandwidth and lower latency.
See more: How Nvidia turned a steal of a deal into its secret weapon
Earlier this month, Nvidia announced two non-exclusive agreements with Coherent $(COHR)$ and Lumentum Holdings $(LITE)$ for advanced laser systems and optical networking offerings. Both companies are leaders in silicon photonics, which involves moving data between chips with light rather than electricity.
The chip maker noted at the time the importance of optical interconnects and advanced chip packaging technology for energy efficiency and higher bandwidth in data centers.
-Britney Nguyen -Emily Bary
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March 15, 2026 09:55 ET (13:55 GMT)
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