Analyst Says Potential Trade War to Have ‘Material Impact’ on Nvidia (NVDA) - InvestingChannel

Analyst Says Potential Trade War to Have ‘Material Impact’ on Nvidia (NVDA)

We recently published a list of Top 10 AI Stocks on Investors’ Radar These Days. In this article, we are going to take a look at where NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stands against other top AI stocks on investors’ radar these days.

The debate around AI systems hitting a “data wall” or plateau is heating up in the tech industry with many arguing that the performance of AI models is not showing signs of further improvement amid a lack of quality inputs, causing scaling issues in the industry.

CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa recently discussed this debate in a program and said:

“All it feels like anyone is talking about right now in tech is this debate over scaling laws and a data wall, which continues to rage in Silicon Valley. This is the idea that more data and bigger models will always lead to better AI, with some arguing that progress has peaked or is starting to plateau. Put another way, it’s a debate over a core assumption in AI that could have massive implications for the industry, from valuations to the GPUs powering it, and of course, the Nvidia story. I was at the Newcomer AI conference yesterday here in San Francisco. It was the theme of the day, with everyone from Scale AI’s Alexander Wang to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi weighing in.”

Jensen Huang was also asked about the issue of AI systems hitting a data wall and possible scaling issues in a latest earnings call. Here is what he said:

“A foundation model pre-training scaling is intact and it’s continuing. As you know, this is an empirical law, not a fundamental physical law, but the evidence is that it continues to scale. What we’re learning, however, is that it’s not enough that we’ve now discovered two other ways to scale. One is post-training scaling. Of course, the first generation of post-training was reinforcement learning human feedback, but now we have reinforcement learning AI feedback and all forms of synthetic data generated data that assists in post-training scaling.”

Read Huang’s comments in detail here.

Bosa mentioned some other tech leaders pushing back against the idea of AI hitting a data wall and said:

“…..also acknowledge that this alone isn’t enough to push AI further, and progress will come from post-training scaling, which is the development of AI applications on top of existing models. He and others say this will still require massive amounts of compute power.

An open question remains: will it be as much? A helpful way to frame that next phase of AI development is digestion or innovation. Maybe both are possible, but digestion might suggest a pullback on the huge amounts of spending and capital expenditures we’ve seen over the last few years. Innovation, on the other hand, could mean doubling down, with just another phase of development beginning. It’s still very much an open question.”

READ ALSO Jim Cramer’s Latest Lightning Round: 11 Stocks to Watch and Jim Cramer on AMD and Other Stocks

For this article we picked 10 AI stocks currently trending on the back of latest analyst ratings and news. With each stock we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

Analyst Says Potential Trade War to Have ‘Material Impact’ on Nvidia (NVDA) A close-up of a colorful high-end graphics card being plugged in to a gaming computer.

Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 193

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) was recently downgraded to Accumulate from Buy by PhillipCapital, which cited recent price movements ahead of the Blackwell ramp.

The firm raised its price target slightly to $160 from $155.

“Hyperscalers are upgrading their AI cloud capabilities to capture cloud service opportunities from Gen AI startups,” said PhillipCapital analyst Yik Ban Chong. “H200 Hopper sales increased to ‘double-digit billions,’ the fastest product ramp in the company’s history, NVDA guided that its demand will continue at least until 2H26.”

Chong added, “Blackwell just started production in 4Q25, and NVDA expects its revenue to exceed their previous estimate of ‘several billion dollars.’ NVDA stated earlier that it expects supply-demand equilibrium to be reached in FY26e.”

PhillipCapital anticipates Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA)’s profit growth to slow after mid-FY26e following Blackwell’s rollout.

Despite this, the firm views Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) as the leader in the AI GPU market, with Blackwell offering 2.2 times the performance of Hopper.

Chong also noted the potential impact of higher trade tariffs between the U.S. and China. “The escalation of the US-China trade war starting from July 2018 caused NVDA’s stock price to fall more than 50% from its peak in October 2018. If similar tariff policies were to be imposed again, there may be a material impact on NVDA’s share price.”

Columbia Seligman Global Technology Fund stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:

“The fund held an underweight position in NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) relative to the S&P North American Technology Sector, which was a headwind on performance following impressive returns from the company in 2023 and the first two quarters of 2024. NVIDIA’s stock fell during periods of the quarter after the company reported second quarter earnings. While the earnings came in higher than expectations, investors were concerned that the company did not guide earnings high enough, signaling a potential slowdown in AI buildout. NVIDIA’s demand remains strong and the company has forecast orders for upcoming quarters. The question that remains is whether the company can meet the demand for its AI processors and connectivity chips. Our team continues to remain cautious on NVIDIA’s high customer concentration. Microsoft and Meta have driven a significant amount of the company’s revenue, which presents added risk.”

Overall, NVDA ranks 3rd on our list of top AI stocks on investors’ radar these days. While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVDA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 8 Best Wide Moat Stocks to Buy Now and 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.

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