Nvidia falls even as BofA expects gaming to 'largely normalize' following CFO dinner
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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares fell nearly 3% in early trading on Thursday as Bank of America met with the company's CFO Colette Kress and other senior executives, pointing out some positive trends for the chip giant.
Analyst Vivek Arya noted that the takeaways from the meeting include:

The gaming channel is expected to "largely normalize" after the end of the current quarter, which ends in January.
There is "solid demand" for the new RTX 40xx series Ada Lovelace gaming products, despite concerns out of China and macro weakness.
The company is "mindful" of cloud spending headwinds, but Nvidia (NVDA) has offerings such as its new H100 Hopper AI accelerators, Grace Hopper CPU/GPU systems and bundling the high-speed networking products from Mellanox to areas of high-performance compute to push through the aforementioned headwinds.

"We maintain Buy and expect the stock to re-energize as we get past Q1 consumer/cloud capex headwinds," Arya wrote in a note to clients. 
Arya also has a $215 price target on Nvidia (NVDA) shares.
Delving deeper, Arya noted that the crypto mining overhang is largely "over" and there is strong demand for the RTX 4090, RTX 4080 and newly announced 4070 Ti. While no specifics were given at the meeting, "normalized" demand for gaming is roughly $2.5B per quarter via sell-through, compared to the current sell-in rate of roughly $1.5B or $1.6B per quarter.
Arya added that China's reopening could create some "turmoil," but the recent approval of new games out of the country and seasonal demand strength could offset those headwinds.
In December, UBS said it was bullish on chips going into 2023, picking Nvidia (NVDA) as one of its top picks, as it forecast momentum building in the back half of the year.