TLDR
- Nvidia stock is up 15% over the past month, but has lagged AMD (+38%) and Intel (+56%) over the same period.
- Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer rates Nvidia Outperform with a $265 price target, calling it a top semiconductor pick.
- Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra (GB300) NVL racks are seen as two generations ahead of competitors in the AI chip market.
- The stock trades at 17x 2027 EPS estimates, below the sector average of 20x.
- Revenue grew from $27 billion in FY23 to nearly $216 billion in FY26, with consensus forecasts pointing to $480 billion by FY28.
Nvidia has been one of the better-performing chip stocks over the past month — just not the best. While NVDA climbed 15% in that window, AMD surged 38% and Intel jumped 56%. The gap has raised questions, but at least one analyst says investors shouldn’t read too much into it.
Oppenheimer’s Rick Schafer rates Nvidia Outperform with a $265 price target. He gives both AMD and Intel only Perform ratings. For Schafer, Nvidia remains his top semiconductor pick heading into earnings season.
The recent outperformance from AMD and Intel comes down to renewed interest in CPUs for AI server builds — a different area than Nvidia’s GPU-focused business. Intel also received a recent boost from Barron’s, which named it a stock pick.
That said, Nvidia’s own story hasn’t gone quiet. NVDA was trading around $198.60 in premarket Friday, April 17, up 0.2% on the day.
Valuation Below Sector Average
Schafer’s note pointed to Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra (GB300) NVL racks as being ahead of the competition by two generations. He also flagged that Nvidia currently trades at around 17x his 2027 EPS forecast — below the sector average of 20x — which he sees as attractive for a company with this kind of dominance.
The stock has risen roughly 75% over the past 12 months. It carries a trailing P/E of around 41x, which some investors have questioned. Trefis analysts argue the multiple is not excessive given the growth runway.
Revenue tells part of that story. Nvidia went from $27 billion in FY23 to nearly $216 billion in FY26 — close to 8x growth. Consensus forecasts now point to $480 billion in revenue by FY28.
Two factors underpin that outlook. The first is the shift from AI training to inference. Training is periodic; inference is ongoing. As agentic AI grows, so does the demand for compute. Companies already on Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem face high switching costs, which keeps them locked in.
Sovereign AI and Margin Story
The second growth driver is Sovereign AI. Governments worldwide are building national AI infrastructure, and Nvidia’s CUDA-based stack makes it a natural fit. In FY26, Nvidia’s sovereign AI revenue tripled, topping $30 billion.
On margins, Nvidia reported net margins of 54% in FY26, up from 31% in FY23. AMD, by comparison, sits around 20%. Trefis projects margins holding around 52% even as product mix shifts.
If revenue reaches $575 billion and margins hold near 52%, that implies net income of around $300 billion — roughly 2.5x the $117 billion reported in FY26.
At a trailing P/E of 25x on that net income, Trefis puts the potential market cap at $7.5 trillion, which would push the stock toward $300.
For context, Cisco trades at around 22x trailing earnings. Microsoft is above 27x.
Nvidia’s next architecture, Vera Rubin, is set to follow Blackwell and is designed to improve inference efficiency and lower cost per token.
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