Nvidia slips even as BofA maintains buy rating, notes 'strong share gains'
BING-JHEN HONG

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares slipped in premarket trading on Thursday even as Bank of America maintained its buy rating on the GPU giant, citing "strong share gains" in the market.
Analyst Vivek Arya noted that the most recent monthly survey of deployed GPUs and CPUs used by Steam PC gamers showed Nvidia's (NVDA) share rose roughly 700 basis points month-over-month to 82.6%. However, Arya cautioned the data could be skewed by a sharp jump in participants using Simplified Chinese as their operating system language. 
"While still generally positive for NVDA, we note overcounting of customers at Asian cyber cafes inflated NVDA share results in prior periods as well (2017/18, potentially late 2020)," Arya wrote in an investor note.
The survey also showed a similar rise for Intel (INTC), which was up roughly 800 basis points month-over-month.
Despite the potential issues from the survey, Arya noted that Nvidia's (NVDA) top graphics cards, the RTX 30 and 40 series, are selling at "modest" 7% to 8% premiums at third-party e-commerce retailers, compared to 10% to 40% discounts for legacy AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) cards. 
Arya said that the gaming market is "on the mend" and advancements in artificial intelligence and the data center should benefit the two semiconductor companies. 
"Like last cycle, both AMD/NVDA have actively cleared channel in early stages of new card launches (NVDA RTX 40 series, AMD 7900 XT/XTX), which should provide ASP boosts (we model 10% [year-over-year] increase in 2023) in conjunction with easier unit comps," Arya wrote. "More importantly, hyperscaler focus on AI/LLMs could accelerate investment in NVDA/AMD for both training and inference applications." 
Separately on Thursday, AMD (AMD) announced the new AMD Alveo MA35D media accelerator.
At a recent conference, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang declared that the "iPhone moment for AI has started."