Nvidia stock was rising early Wednesday as the market digested the news from its developers' conference.
Wall Street applauded the chip maker's technology announcements but noted the biggest leaps in artificial-intelligence hardware might require some patience.
Nvidia shares were up 1.39% at $117.04 in premarket trading on Wednesday after closing down 3.4% the previous day. Futures tracking the S&P 500 index were gaining 0.1%.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's keynote address at the company's GTC event on Tuesday brought a flurry of news but the most eagerly watched was its AI chip road map. Nvidia is continuing its plan for annual improvements as it aims to dominate both in AI training and inference -- the process of generating answers from models.
Rubin graphics-processing units will be next year's main AI chip, replacing the Blackwell architecture. Rubin-based servers coming in 2026 will offer more than three times the performance of Blackwell Ultra servers, which are slated to debut in the second half of 2025.
However, a bigger jump will be represented by the release of Vera Rubin Ultra in the second half of 2027, a system that promises 14.4 times the performance of current Grace Blackwell hardware.
"The updated road map does suggest Rubin will only be an incremental update in 2026 with Rubin Ultra the more meaningful leap ahead in 2027," wrote Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis in a research note.
One positive for bulls is that the Blackwell Ultra release planned for this year uses the same server-rack architecture as Nvidia's existing AI chips. KeyBanc analyst John Vinh noted that this should mean a relatively easy transition and accelerated shipments in the second half of this year.
Vinh kept an Outperform rating and $190 target price on Nvidia stock, based on a price-to-earnings multiple of 30 times his estimate for the company's fiscal 2027 earnings. He noted that compared with a current multiple of around 20 times its forward earnings.
Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was rising 0.6% and Broadcom was up 0.1% in premarket trading. Nvidia's Huang questioned Broadcom's forecast for market-share gains by its AI custom chips in comments to Barron's on Tuesday.
