Nvidia’s big GTC showcase barely budged the stock. Is that a problem?
A day after Jensen Huang unveiled a new chip and updated guidance at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference, the stock is … not doing much. That raises the question: Was this year’s keynote a disappointment? Has the stock simply run out of steam? Nvidia has one of the most frustrating stocks in the market, especially for fundamental investors like us. The problem isn’t that the stock has been flat for eight months; it’s that the stock has been flat despite positive updates after positive updates, including blockbuster earnings reports. That makes it a classic case of a broken stock, not a broken company. What we heard at GTC demands that we maintain a position in the name and reminds us that this remains a stock to be owned long-term, not traded. For those who don’t own any Nvidia shares, the muted response to a remarkable keynote presents a buying opportunity. There are many reasons a stock gets stuck. In the case of Nvidia, it may have something to do with the options market and hedging activities on the part of the liquidity providers known as market makers and large shareholders that essentially render the stock “pinned” around current levels. Without getting too far into the weeds, the main point is that the stock’s lack of momentum may be tied to market mechanics more than anything else. Could there be other forces keeping a lid on the stock? Sure. We could always blame investor sentiment, but it’s hard to believe they’re souring on a company that keeps humming. After all, the consolidation certainly isn’t due to a lack of growth. Annual revenue growth is set to accelerate over the next two quarters. What about further out on the horizon, because we know some investors always seem to be worried that AI spending is peaking? Well, one of the big headlines from Jensen’s keynote was the disclosure that Nvidia has high-confidence visibility into at least $1 trillion in revenue from Blackwell and Vera Rubin between 2025 and 2027. In effect, Jensen told us to expect several billion dollars in sales upside in each of the next eight quarters. Grace Blackwell is Nvidia’s current-generation AI computing platform. Rubin is its successor and is on track to launch later this year. Coming into the keynote, analysts expected total data center revenue of about $960 billion over this three-year period, according to FactSet. That means about $40 billion in upside over the next eight quarters, or about $5 billion per quarter. Importantly, the $1 trillion figure appears to be a revenue floor, not a wildly speculative outlook from management. The reason: It encompasses only Nvidia’s high-confidence visibility into sales for Blackwell and Rubin-era systems. Jensen made that clear during his interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC earlier Tuesday. In other words, not included in this figure are Nvidia’s fledgling business selling standalone CPUs, which Jensen on Monday labeled a multi-billion-dollar business opportunity. Since launching its first-ever central processing unit (CPU) in early 2023, Nvidia has always sold them alongside its bread-and-butter graphics processing units (GPUs) in server racks. Additionally, it doesn’t include standalone networking sales or the new Groq-infused inference chip. That Groq wasn’t included is particularly noteworthy given that Jensen said he believes around 25% of workloads that will run on Vera Rubin can benefit even more from running on Groq’s inference-focused chip. The line of sight to $1 trillion in revenue also doesn’t include any of Nvidia’s segments outside the data center, with arguably the most exciting being its automotive business. While roughly 1% of sales last fiscal year, Nvidia’s auto unit has the potential to generate billions in recurring sales over time as autonomous vehicle technology improves and more driverless vehicles hit the road in the coming years. So, what do we do when no amount of good news seems to get Nvidia shares moving higher again? For starters, we must remember the investing rule that “giving up on value is a sin.” We also must remember that, in the near term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, however, it’s a weighing machine. Nvidia has only gotten more valuable during this stalled-out period. When a company’s share price doesn’t move but its earnings keep growing, the stock is becoming cheaper by the day, as measured by its price-to-earnings ratio. For now, nobody seems to care that Nvidia’s P/E multiple has been shrinking since the summer. The market is in voting-machine mode. That can last a while, and it certainly has. Investors have been given reason after reason to conclude Nvidia’s growth can’t sustain — be it concerns that their customers are “recklessly” draining their cash flow, to a war in Iran, supply chain bottlenecks, and competition from the likes of Google’s in-house silicon. At some point, the increasing weight of earnings growth demands attention. We believe the market will eventually be forced to acknowledge that the stock has been trading at a far cheaper valuation than previously thought. We don’t know exactly when that will happen or what will cause it. Perhaps it will be on the back of a strong earnings print or some other announcement like a capital expenditure guide from a key customer. Without a crystal ball, it’s better to simply stick with the stock and wait for the market to come to its senses, rather than try to trade in and out of the name. The stock’s valuation is getting a bit ridiculous considering what we know about Nvidia’s book of business for this year and next. We’re not alone. Bernstein analysts told clients Tuesday morning that the stock looks “almost absurdly valued.” Nvidia shares are trading at roughly 17 times the 2027 earnings per share (EPS) consensus of $10.68, according to FactSet. It’s even cheaper than that, given analysts are likely reworking their models to account for Jensen’s $1 trillion disclosure. Analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald actually see a path to $15 in earnings in 2027, which, if realized, would put the stock at about 12 times 2027 earnings. As of Tuesday, the S & P 500 is trading at roughly 18 times 2027 earnings estimates, per FactSet. Of course, the start of 2027 is still many months away. But this goes to show that if Nvidia doesn’t catch a bid soon, we’re going to be looking at a stock that likely trades below 15 times forward estimates — assuming analysts do upwardly revise their earnings estimates and Nvidia books additional orders for 2027. That could happen by the end of this year. At that point, it’s going to get very hard to ignore the stock. In what world should the dominant maker of AI chips trade at a lower valuation than spice maker McCormick, which currently trades at roughly 17 times 2027 estimates? That’s not a knock on McCormick. It makes great seasonings, especially Lawry’s, which is pretty good on a can of tuna, by the way. But it’s not exactly developing technology on par with electricity or the internet. As annoying as this stint of consolidation has been, we must remember that investing is about discipline, and the disciplined thing to do is to wait patiently, or even to take advantage of those who have given up and moved on from the stock in frustration. We do understand that there is an opportunity cost to holding a stock that does nothing for an extended period; however, it’s important to acknowledge that even with this eight-month period of inaction, the stock is still up more than 50% over the past year. We suspect more upside is in the cards as we work our way through 2026 and the stock simply becomes too cheap to ignore. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA and GOOGL. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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