Nvidia stock doesn’t look like it will get a lift from its developer event this week. But Wall Street analysts are still applauding the chip maker’s initiatives and there’s another high-profile cheerleader—Elon Musk.
The company’s shares didn’t respond much to the GTC event where the company unveiled an array of new artificial-intelligence trips and CEO Jensen Huang gave an upbeat forecast of $1 trillion in revenue for its flagship processors through 2027.
One persistent concern is that major customers such as Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX—which now houses his xAI company—will look to replace Nvidia chips with their own processors. But the Tesla CEO played down expectations that in-house chips would fully replace Nvidia hardware within data centers late Wednesday.
“I am a huge admirer of Nvidia and Jensen [Huang] btw. That market cap is well-deserved,” Musk said in a post on social-media platform X. “SpaceX AI and Tesla expect to continue ordering Nvidia chips at scale.”
The post came as Musk was laying out plans for Tesla’s Terafab, a large semiconductor manufacturing facility. He has previously said that Tesla is set to become the largest global maker of AI chips.
It’s important for Nvidia to lock down Musk’s companies as a major client. If anything can get Nvidia stock moving again it will likely be the listing of major AI companies this year, which includes SpaceX’s initial public offering. SpaceX is reportedly seeking a $1.5 trillion valuation, and will attempt to raise up to $50 billion, partly to put AI data centers in space.
Meanwhile, Wall Street was happy enough with Nvidia’s GTC announcements. Nvidia stock got a raft of target price upgrades, raising the average across analysts polled by FactSet to $268.96.
Nvidia shares were down 1.1% at $178.50 in premarket trading Thursday.
One typical appraisal came from Truist Securities analyst William Stein, who raised his target price on Nvidia stock to $287 from $283 and kept a Buy rating. He noted that the company’s $1 trillion revenue forecast for Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips alone excludes other hardware such as its processors based on technology from AI start-up Groq.
“Considering that consensus is for total data center revenue of ~$950B from 2025-2027, it’s clear that there is at least modest upside in 2026 and 2027,” Stein wrote.
Among other chip makers, Broadcom was down 1.5% and Advanced Micro Devices was falling 1.5% in Thursday’s premarket.