One of Wall Street’s biggest Nvidia (NVDA) bulls is standing pat in the face of a fierce sell-off in the stock.
BofA’s Vivek Arya reiterated Nvidia as his top pick for 2025 on Tuesday, ahead of a potentially catalyzing earnings report on Feb. 26. Arya’s price target of $190 assumes about 57% upside from current trading levels.
Arya has one of the highest price target on Nvidia on the Street, as Yahoo Finance data below shows.
“The [earnings] call could mark the trough in investor sentiment as: 1) we expect Nvidia to reassure on Blackwell execution, 2) Signal confidence around fiscal year 2026/calendar year 2025 with 60%+ year over year growth in data center sales (still leaves headroom vs. Taiwan Semiconductor’s call for AI to grow 100%+ year over year in calendar year 2025 end), and 3) create excitement ahead of flagship GTC Conf. (Mar 17) where focus shifts to solid pipeline (GB300, Rubin), and physical AI (robotics),” Arya wrote in the note to clients.
In an October appearance on the Opening Bid podcast, Arya said he sees Nvidia as a “generational investment.”
To be sure, Arya’s Nvidia defense (and those of other bulls) has fallen on deaf ears so far this year — and with valid reasons.
China-based DeepSeek surprised markets in late January after unveiling RI, its AI model that gave a ChatGPT-esque performance at a cheaper price tag. RI costs a reported $5.6 million to build a base model, compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars incurred at US-based companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Fears mounted instantly that US companies are overspending on AI infrastructure, which includes Nvidia chips.
“Conventional wisdom all of last year was that training amazing models was going to be possible for only a handful of companies,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy told me on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast (listen below). “What DeepSeek has done over the past few weeks is shatter that belief by saying they can train a model for $6 million.”
Meanwhile, with giants like Amazon (AMZN) announcing an $8 billion partnership with Anthropic to enter the AI chip space and Google (GOOG) dropping a supercomputer with an AI chip called Willow, it’s evident Big Tech companies want in on Nvidia’s hefty market share.
Further, Broadcom (AVGO) and Marvell (MRVL) have released advanced custom chips.
“The fact that Jensen doesn’t even make his own chips — that everyone has Taiwan Semiconductor available — is all the more credit to him at the design level, the way they have done things is pretty fantastic. I would say I wouldn’t want to be Jensen necessarily because wow, other people are working on the same things,” Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates told me on Opening Bid.
