Nvidia stock pops as analysts praise GTC, say 'generative AI is here'
Antonio Bordunovi/iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares rose more than 2.5% on Wednesday as Wall Street analysts praised the company's announcements from its GTC developer conference, including several major new partnerships.
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya, who reiterated the firm's buy rating and raised the per-share price target to $310 from $275, noted the keynote address, given by CEO Jensen Huang, "fundamentally" widened the company's competitive moat and expanded its opportunity to the "multi-trillion" IT and infrastructure as a service industry, from just being only focused on chips. 
He noted the scope and ambition of the keynote "reinforces NVDAâs dominance in the nascent generative AI/large language model market that could reshape the existing tech industry and usher in disruptive startups," Arya wrote in an investor note.
The analyst also pointed out Nvidia's size, scope and vision could help bring large language models to "almost every end-market," highlighting the partnerships with Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) Compute Platform and Oracle (ORCL).
Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon added that accelerated computing is finally a reality and Nvidia (NVDA) looks "uniquely" suited to benefit from it as it brings both hardware and software to the table to drive efficiencies in the data center, both in terms of cost and power, while CPUs are increasingly falling behind. 
Rasgon also highlighted the four new platforms that were announced - L4 (for AI video), L40 (AI image generation), H100 NVL (for large language models) and Grace Hopper (for recommender engines) - as signs that generative AI is capable of driving upside both in the near and longer-terms. 
"For better or for worse we keep coming to the conclusion that NVDA is the answer as their hardware appears uniquely suited to handle the massive increase in compute intensity generative AI drives," Rasgon, who rates Nvidia (NVDA), outperform, wrote. "Indeed, the massive [total addressable market] numbers the company has put out are looking a little less outlandish every day." 
Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis, who has an overweight rating on Nvidia (NVDA), said the keynote showed the company is the "king" of generative AI.
"Clearly expectation were very high going into GTC, but this is the biggest secular tailwind in Tech and NVDA remains well ahead of the competition," Curtis wrote. 
Raymond James analyst Srini Pajjuri, who has a strong buy on Nvidia (NVDA) shares, also praised the company's automotive and cloud services initiatives, as the company's auto pipeline is now at $14B in design wins (up from a previous $11B) and cloud services opens up a new growth avenue. 
"We estimate that Cloud service offerings present [roughly $1B per year] incremental revenue opportunity in the next 2â3 years," Pajjuri wrote, citing $2.23B in cloud-related purchase commitments over the next four to six years.
On Tuesday, Nvidia (NVDA) reportedly increased the order for AI-linked chips via Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) due to high demand.