Nvidia (NVDA -3.00%) dominated much of the conversation among investors in 2024 as the stock marched 171% higher for the year. That was for good reason, as revenue and earnings exploded, with many big tech companies scrambling to acquire Nvidia’s advanced chips for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.
CEO Jensen Huang just gave the keynote speech at the CES conference in Las Vegas, providing updates on Nvidia’s latest advanced semiconductor chips and other products. That news led one Wall Street analyst to recommend that Nvidia stock should be bought. Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer sees another 25% upside from recent levels, with a price target of $175 per share.
Beyond data centers
Huang’s CES presentation wasn’t what some analysts expected. Many expected him to provide more details on sales of the latest Blackwell GPU (graphics processing unit) architecture, or insights into the next-generation Rubin platform. But Huang instead looked even beyond that.
In the nine months ended Oct. 27, 2024, Nvidia derived more than 87% of revenue from its data center segment. That’s not surprising as large hyperscaler companies race to build data centers filled with Nvidia’s advanced chips.
But the Oppenheimer analyst pointed out other areas that Nvidia’s CEO discussed as growth drivers moving forward. In his note, Schafer wrote: “Robotics and automotive are growing AI market opportunities. Management highlighted the need for three computing systems in robotics/auto,” according to reports.
Nvidia also revealed a new generation of gaming GPUs. Schafer pointed to Nvidia’s focus on offerings for industry-specific options, including NVIDIA NIM for manufacturing. Other enterprise solutions are large language models (LLMs) dubbed Nemotron and NeMo. These are cloud-based frameworks to create synthetic data for training other LLMs or building AI agents for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and other applications.
It’s clear that Nvidia’s solutions just start with its GPU hardware. Huang even introduced a new desktop supercomputer currently called Project DIGITS. It’s due out in May and aimed at academics and researchers who don’t have the immense data center compute power at their disposal. All these opportunities make Nvidia a buy at recent prices.
