Nvidia (NVDA) shares jumped 4.5% last week after Needham raised its price target to $350 a share — the most bullish on Wall Street — saying its dominance in artificial intelligence and has it well positioned to capitalize on the next wave of computing.
“We see striking parallels between Nvidia's dominance in Artificial Intelligence/ Machine learning and the ‘Wintel' platform during the era of PC computing,” Needham analyst Rajvindra Gill in a note sent out to clients on Friday. Wintel comes from two words “Windows” and “Intel” and refers to all personal computers based on the Intel microprocessor and one of the Windows operating system from Microsoft.
The chipmaker on Wednesday launched AI data-center platform TensorRT, which could deliver the industry’s most advanced inference acceleration for a wide range of services such as enhanced-natural-language interactions and direct answers to search queries rather than a list of possible results.
“We think that its unified CUDA platform combined with its proprietary interconnect and comprehensive inference/training software makes it uniquely positioned to capitalize on this next wave of computing,” he added.
Last month, the company unveiled a new lineup of video cards — GeForce RTX series. The flagship card will have 11 GB of memory with 4352 CUDA cores, a 20% jump from the previous generation. Based on its new Turing GPU architecture, the video cards can realize real-time ray tracing, a technology that allows for more cinematic and realistic rendering for animation or video games. It's the first time this technology has been widely available to every day consumers.
As part of Nvidia's second-quarter earnings, the chipmaker edged out Wall Street's expectations but cut its third-quarter revenue guidance and warned it's crypto business is going to zero.
Nvidia shares are up 37% this year.