Nvidia's rally so far this year has added nearly $300 million to chip maker's market cap as it launches new products aimed at a boom in artificial-intelligence computing and services
Fresh off its worst annual performance since the financial crisis, Nvidia Corp.'s stock has started off 2023 with a bang.
Shares of Nvidia $(NVDA)$ are up 81% so far this year, putting them on track for their best quarterly performance since the fourth quarter of 2001, according to Dow Jones Market Data. They're also on pace for their fourth best quarterly performance on record.
The company has seen its market value almost double in the first three months of the year, rising by nearly $300 million, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Nvidia is now valued at just upwards of $650 billion.
Nvidia has won over Wall Street thanks to its potential within the buzzy artificial-intelligence market. Companies are rushing to get in on the AI craze amid the surging popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, and Nvidia's technology helps in the training of AI applications.
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"The high capital intensity of these workloads, particularly on the training side, is now a major part of the calculus for the largest companies in technology, with Nvidia having dominance in the training market that is likely to persist for several years," Morgan Stanley's Joseph Moore wrote as he turned bullish on the shares earlier in March.
He added that "the development of generational AI is too much of a megatrend to get distracted by tactical concerns."
The company's opportunity to capitalize on the AI rush shone through at its annual GTC developer conference this month, as Nvidia rolled out new products and services focused on AI. The company announced a deal with Alphabet Inc.'s $(GOOGL)$ GOOG Google Cloud to help that company with its AI efforts, and discussed the financial implications of this budding trend.
While generative AI --the type of AI that ChatGPT represents--has represented only a "tiny, tiny, tiny" percentage of Nvidia's revenue over the past year, it's poised to become "quite large," Chief Executive Jensen Huang said at a press conference for GTC.
Beyond its headline events, GTC also featured various panels and presentations on themes related to Nvidia's business, and UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri made a point to listen to what he deemed "the most relevant" ones.
"Overall, these presentations confirmed our view that Nvidia is quite literally the nexus of AI," Arcuri wrote Monday, as he boosted his price target on Nvidia's stock to $315 from $270. "We are struck by the sheer scope of the opportunity and Nvidia's position in data science/large models, software, and hardware leadership."
Rosenblatt Securities analysts Kevin Cassidy and Hans Mosesmann also cheered Nvidia's positioning in a weekend note to clients.
"There is no company that has Nvidia's in-house full-stack of AI expertise and scale," they wrote. "We see Nvidia entering a new phase of business/model inflection as the AI world transitions to production or 'inference' from a more training-centric modality."
Rosenblatt Securities analysts deemed Nvidia and Marvell Technology Inc. $(MRVL)$ their top secular picks in the industry.
Wall Street's warming to Nvidia, yet again, comes after the shares shed half their value in 2022 amid broader concerns about what the end of the stay-home boom during the pandemic would mean for chip companies that help power devices like personal computers. Across the 23 full calendar years that Nvidia has been public, the stock has only posted annual declines seven.