Nvidia's GTC shows it keeps 'pushing the envelope' in AI: analysts
Mar. 19, 2025 7:50 AM ET
By: Chris Ciaccia, SA News Editor
After Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) Chief Executive Jensen Huang delivered the keynote address at the company's GTC event, several Wall Street firms praised the company for its unique ability to continue expanding its lead in the artificial intelligence spending race.
Shares rose 1% in premarket trading on Wednesday.
KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst John Vinh, who has an Overweight rating on Nvidia, said there were numerous highlights from the keynote, including: the Blackwell Ultra NVL72 announcement; the Vera Rubin NVL144, with Vera being the Arm-based CPU and Rubin the next-gen GPU; and the co-packaged optical at 1.6TB, which should ship in the second half of this year.
“NVDA continues to push the envelope on performance with its annual cadence roadmap, such that it remains the clear leader in AI, in our view; and Blackwell Ultra (GB300) uses the same rack architecture as GB200, and as such we expect a rather seamless transition as NVDA will unlikely have to go through the same learning curve in ramping GB200 NVL72, which should allow NVDA to accelerate GB NVL rack shipments in 2H25,” Vinh wrote in a note to clients.
Wedbush Securities analysts said all the announcements – including robotics – are further indication that the AI revolution is not slowing down.
“This is now about the ripple impact for tech as we estimate for every $1 spent on an Nvidia chip there is [an] $8 to $10 multiplier across the tech ecosystem with the hyperscalers, software, data center build outs, cybersecurity, and energy demand all benefiting from this $2 trillion of AI CapEx set to take place over the next 3 years,” Wedbush analysts wrote.
Stifel analyst Ruben Roy said the announcements, including the launch of Dynamo – Nvidia's inferencing software aimed at optimizing reasoning models – only add to Nvidia's already high level of innovation.
“We continue to view NVDA's innovation on AI infrastructure positively within the backdrop of a broader accelerated computing market which is forecast to drive data center capex to ~$1T annually by the end of the decade,” Roy wrote in a note to clients.
Three issues stood out to Citi analyst Atif Malik, which he said should be viewed positively by investors: that Nvidia now sees $1T in capex spending by 2028, an expansion of its total addressable market; Blackwell is surpassing expectations, given the top 4 hyperscalers have already purchased 3.6M units in 2025, compared to the 1.3M Hopper GPUs purchased in 2025; and it is pressing the gas when it comes to its product roadmap.
“Net-net, we came out of the keynote reassured in Nvidia's leadership, which if anything, seems to be expanding,” Malik wrote.
Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said while there were “no big surprises” for him during the keynote, Nvidia made a “strong case” there will be multiple waves of AI scaling requirements.
“We aren't sure what's going to shift the market from taking a glass-half-empty view of this situation, but the demand picture will stay strong through the visibility window, and the concerns we hear that ASICs are causing competitive and margin pressure are going to vanish fairly quickly when they materially outgrow ASIC competition in [the second-half of 2025], as gross margins return to the mid-70s...” Moore wrote in a note to clients. |
