Nvidia Stock Has Been Quiet for Months—Can GTC, Opening Tonight, Turn the Tide?

NVIDIA is at a critical juncture: most analysts are optimistic about its fundamentals, but the stock performance this year has been flat, and market doubts remain. The annual GTC conference kicks off this week, providing the best opportunity for this AI chip giant to reignite investor confidence.

The GTC 2026 conference will be held from March 16-19, 2026, with Jensen Huang delivering a keynote speech on March 16, 11:00-13:00 Pacific Time (02:00-04:00 Beijing Time on March 17).

Investors are most concerned about the company’s strategic layout for inference chips, the latest roadmap for chip development, and the supply outlook for wafers, memory, and optical components. These details will directly influence market judgments on whether NVIDIA can continue to lead in the AI spending wave.

Bank of America believes that concerns over the sustainability of capital expenditure by hyperscale cloud providers, combined with geopolitical uncertainties, are the core reasons for NVIDIA’s continued valuation pressure. Even if GTC’s sales outlook aligns with market expectations, as long as it includes specific supply and demand visibility details, it could support a phase of stock price recovery.

However, UBS, while optimistic about NVIDIA’s fundamentals, points out that relying on statements from this conference to trigger a “change in investment logic” and a surge in stock price is “hard to predict.” The bank also admits that the contrast between NVIDIA’s impressive earnings outlook and its discounted valuation appears to be in a “seemingly unsustainable” state.

Behind the Stock Price Slump: Valuation Normalization and Growth Expectation Gap

After a cumulative increase of 22,000% over ten years, NVIDIA’s stock has stagnated this year, prompting some investors to question whether its next growth phase can sustain the previous momentum.

From a valuation perspective, NVIDIA is trading at 17 times its expected earnings for the next fiscal year, below the overall valuation level of the S&P 500. According to FactSet, among 70 analysts covering NVIDIA, 93% have a buy rating, with an average target price of about $267.

Free cash flow projections show that NVIDIA’s free cash flow for this fiscal year (ending January 2027) is expected to grow by 85% year-over-year to over $178 billion, significantly accelerating from the previous year. If realized, this would set a new record for free cash flow among global companies.

It is expected to further rise to $233 billion in the next fiscal year. However, the current forecast range shows a difference of $98 billion between the high and low estimates, reflecting considerable market uncertainty about NVIDIA’s future profitability.

GTC Key Focus: Entering the AI Inference Market

Wall Street Insights previously highlighted that the most noteworthy aspect of GTC is NVIDIA’s strategic shift from training to inference and its supply chain adjustments. The company may announce a major entry into the AI inference market by integrating Groq technology; on the manufacturing side, it might introduce Samsung for the first time to break TSMC’s monopoly, with OpenAI potentially becoming one of its first major clients.

Bank of America expects NVIDIA to showcase a new generation of products during the keynote, with key highlights including an integrated Groq-based language processing unit (LPU) rack system, new high-speed switches, and co-packaged optical (CPO) solutions. There is also a possibility of jointly launching a custom x86 processor with Intel.

In recent years, AI chip spending has mainly focused on training scenarios, which rely heavily on GPUs’ strength in large-scale parallel computing. This explains why NVIDIA, originally designed for gaming graphics rendering, has dominated the AI infrastructure market.

However, inference decoding scenarios require dedicated non-GPU chips. To address this, NVIDIA invested about $20 billion last year to acquire Groq’s LPU technology and talent. Groq specializes in designing chips for inference decoding.

It is expected that Jensen Huang will elaborate at GTC on how NVIDIA plans to integrate LPU into its chip portfolio to cover training, pre-filling, and decoding applications, while also defending against competition from large cloud providers developing their own chips.

Capital Expenditure Wave: Continued Investment in AI Infrastructure

NVIDIA’s performance outlook largely depends on the sustained increase in AI infrastructure investments by hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft.

For example, Amazon’s capital expenditure has ranged from $50 billion to $60 billion annually from 2021 to 2023, and this year is expected to jump to $190 billion, with nearly all of the increase directed toward AI infrastructure, including large purchases of NVIDIA chips.

Barclays last week forecasted that total industry capital expenditure in AI will peak around $1 trillion by 2028, then “moderately decline.” The bank also believes that market expectations for hyperscale cloud providers’ capital spending in 2028 are underestimated by about $300 billion.

Market Reactions to GTC: Diverging Wall Street Views

There are differing opinions on whether GTC can trigger a substantial breakthrough in NVIDIA’s stock price.

Bank of America believes that concerns over the sustainability of hyperscale cloud providers’ capital expenditure and geopolitical uncertainties are the main reasons for NVIDIA’s valuation pressure. Even if GTC’s sales outlook aligns with expectations, providing specific supply and demand visibility could support a phase of stock price recovery.

UBS, while optimistic about NVIDIA’s fundamentals, states that relying on this conference’s statements to trigger a “change in investment logic” and a surge in stock price is “hard to foresee.” The bank also admits that the gap between NVIDIA’s strong earnings outlook and its discounted valuation appears “unsustainable.”

In other words, the market does not doubt NVIDIA’s fundamentals but is waiting for a clear signal that can dispel doubts and reshape expectations. Jensen Huang’s speech this week will be the most important opportunity in the near term.

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