Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Apple overtook Nvidia on Friday to become the world’s most valuable company, reshuffling the top ranks of tech heavyweights as investors reassess the outlook for artificial intelligence.

Apple was last valued at $4.88 trillion as its shares held steady, while Nvidia was roughly at $4.86 trillion, following a 3.5% decline.

The shift in the pecking order illustrates that investors are broadening their focus beyond the most obvious beneficiaries of the AI boom, such as Nvidia, which had been at the helm for nearly a year. 

The iPhone maker is reclaiming the top spot for the first time since April last year. REUTERS Apple is reclaiming the top spot for the first time since April last year.

“Apple was seen as a laggard in the AI race because it wasn’t spending to develop models, but now sentiment has changed,” said Toni Meadows, head of investment at BRI Wealth Management.

“Apple is less exposed to capex intensity and better positioned to monetize AI via services, ecosystem lock-in, and hardware upgrades. The re-rating reflects confidence in earnings durability rather than speculative AI upside.”

For a company that was often seen trailing in the AI race, the milestone reflects Apple’s efforts to establish itself more firmly among the sector’s leading players, and could shape how CEO Tim Cook’s final months at the helm are viewed.

Cook is preparing to cede his role to hardware veteran John Ternus in September.

Last month, the company rolled out a long-delayed overhaul of Siri, betting the upgraded assistant would help close the gap ‌with Big Tech rivals and new-age startups in the crucial AI race.

Apple CEO Tim Cookt with his successor John Ternus earlier this month. Getty Images Some analysts say Apple is sitting on an ​AI gold mine in the form of the personal data that lives on every iPhone.

The data could make Siri’s answers more useful and the assistant more capable.

The challenge is that such data is locked away in operating systems in the name of privacy and the company would have to find a way to unlock its value.

AI spending lifts new winners Nvidia became the first company in the world to surpass a $5 trillion market valuation in October, a landmark that propelled it into a rarefied territory that was far beyond the reach of its rivals.

Being superseded by Apple does not necessarily signal a lasting change in the companies’ relative standing. The chipmaker remains a major beneficiary of AI-related spending, and its graphics processors are powering much of the generative AI frenzy.

Nvidia could also reclaim the top spot if sentiment shifts.

Nvidia became the first company in the world to surpass a $5 trillion market valuation in October. CEo Jensen Huang, above. Getty Images Besides, Apple is in a delicate position itself, having raised prices to offset rising costs — a strategy that could hurt demand.

“I don’t see any meaningful distinction. Nvidia likely to be a significant participant in whatever happens going forward,” said Benjamin Hall, vice president, alpha research at Segal Marco Advisors.

However, the AI enthusiasm has spread to other corners of the semiconductor industry. The bigger winners this year have been memory chipmakers such as Micron, which crossed $1 trillion in market value in May as investors embraced the significance of memory chips in AI infrastructure.

South Korea’s SK Hynix also listed on the Nasdaq earlier this month, adding another player to the race for investor attention.

South Korea’s SK Hynix also listed on the Nasdaq earlier this month, adding another player to the race for investor attention. REUTERS “The new entrants to the market could spread out the focus away from the pure Magnificent Seven names into a wider number of names,” Hall said.

The eye-watering chips rally ran into turbulence in July as investors reassessed the sustainability of the artificial intelligence trade, knocking the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index down almost 19% from its all-time highs.

Despite the steep fall, the index has performed better than Nvidia so far this year.

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The pitch behind Capital Group Growth ETF (NYSEARCA:CGGR) is that a veteran team can beat the index by leaning into the same megacap winners it already owns, only more deliberately concentrated, and charge you almost nothing for it. CGGR has grown into one of the larger active growth ETFs on that pitch, anchoring its book with Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, and Broadcom. Whether CGGR is actually paying off depends on which benchmark you hold it against.

What CGGR Is Actually Buying Capital Group runs CGGR out of the same shop behind American Funds, which means fundamental research, low turnover in the mid-teens, and an expense ratio of 0.39%. That is roughly a fifth of what a typical actively managed fund charges and puts CGGR within striking distance of pure passive growth ETFs. The structural advantage matters: active ETFs historically struggle to justify their fees, but CGGR’s pricing removes the most common objection before the debate over stock selection even begins.

The holdings are doing their job. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) reported Q1 FY27 revenue of $82 billion, up 85% year over year, with Data Center revenue of $75 billion. CEO Jensen Huang framed the setup bluntly, calling the AI factory buildout “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.” Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) delivered Q1 2026 revenue of $56 billion, up 33% year over year, though the $10.44 EPS beat consensus of $6.66 largely because of an $8 billion tax benefit.

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) is up roughly 29% over the trailing year, with AI semiconductor revenue tracking toward CEO Hock Tan’s stated $100B target by 2027. Even Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), the volatile one, is about 19% higher over the past 12 months, helped by an expansion in auto gross margin to 21.1% and FSD subscriptions crossing 1.28 million. So the underlying names are working. Holdings, though, are not the same as fund returns, and that gap is where the CGGR story gets complicated.

How The Fund Actually Performed CGGR returned roughly 11% over the trailing twelve months. The S&P 500 returned about 21% over the same window, and the Nasdaq-100 returned 25%. Vanguard’s passive growth ETF delivered about 17%, Schwab’s competing product returned about 18%, and the iShares Russell 1000 Growth vehicle came in at around 13%, essentially tied with CGGR. The dispersion is not enormous in absolute terms, but for an actively managed fund selling itself on stock-picking edge, trailing three of four passive peers is a meaningful result.

An investor who bought CGGR twelve months ago for its Magnificent Seven concentration got a fund that trailed the plain S&P 500 meaningfully and lagged every mainstream passive growth alternative except the Russell 1000 Growth tracker. Year to date, the pattern holds, with CGGR up under 4% against roughly 10% for SPY and nearly 15% for QQQ. The short-term scoreboard is not kind to the active thesis.

The multi-year picture is kinder. Since early 2022, CGGR has returned roughly 90%, competitive with VUG’s 84% and SCHG’s 91%, though still short of QQQ’s 97%. Over a full cycle that spans the 2022 drawdown and the subsequent AI-led recovery, the fund is roughly earning its keep. Over the past year, it has not been, and investors evaluating a purchase today have to decide which window matters more.

What The Concentration Costs Active management in a top-heavy market is a hard job. Any underweight in the largest names, even a small one, costs real return when those names lead, and a 0.39% fee is generous by active standards but still meaningfully more than what the leading passive growth funds charge for essentially the same top-five exposure. The math is unforgiving: when the index’s top holdings are also the year’s best performers, the active manager needs conviction bets outside those names to add value, and CGGR’s low turnover suggests those bets are not being made aggressively.

Concentration works both ways. If the megacap trade cracks, CGGR cracks with it, and turnover of around 16% suggests the manager will not rotate quickly. Nvidia alone, trading at a P/E of 42x on a $4.8 trillion market cap, represents both the fund’s biggest tailwind and its biggest single-stock risk. You are paying, modestly, for a portfolio that has just underperformed the passive alternative you skipped.

Where CGGR Fits And Where It Doesn’t CGGR is a credible active-growth vehicle at a near-index price, and its multi-year record holds up against the passive field. The case for buying it right now, on the strength of the same megacap names anyone can own through cheaper index products, is thinner.

The trailing-year cost has investors paying for real growth relative to passive ETFs that own the same top-five stocks with less discretion. Reserve CGGR for a satellite growth sleeve if you specifically want Capital Group’s research process on your side. If your only reason for owning it is Magnificent Seven exposure, the passive versions did the job better, cheaper, and more predictably.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Aug. 4 is a major date for AMD (AMD 4.43%) and Nvidia (NVDA 3.10%) investors alike. It's when AMD reports second-quarter earnings, and it has major implications for both stocks.

It's possible that the two stocks could move in opposite directions after this announcement, and each group of investors (maybe you're invested in both stocks) needs to be prepared.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

AMD needs to blow expectations out of the water AMD is obviously the primary stock affected by its own earnings report, and it has a lot to prove this quarter. Wall Street analysts expect 47% revenue growth to $11.3 billion this quarter, up from $10.3 billion in Q1 when it posted 38% growth. However, meeting expectations likely won't be good enough for AMD. AMD's stock has been on an absolute tear in 2026. It's up more than 130% so far, with a vast majority of that rise coming during the past few months since it reported Q1 earnings. There are high expectations for AMD to deliver huge revenue and profit growth, and if AMD doesn't deliver, the stock could slip based on elevated expectations.

This is reflected in AMD's forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, as it trades for almost 75 times forward earnings.

AMD PE Ratio (Forward) data by YCharts

That's a major premium for any stock, and AMD has high expectations to live up to. For the market to be satisfied with AMD's results, it will likely need to raise its forecast and blow current quarter expectations out of the water. Informing investors of GPU shipments to China would also be a huge boost. Lastly, AMD's profit margins need to expand. If investors receive bad news on any of these fronts, the stock could be ripe for a sell-off, as most big tech companies involved in the AI build-out trade for a maximum of about 30 times forward earnings.

There are a lot of things that need to go right for AMD, making the stock a bit precarious to invest in before it reports earnings.

Nvidia needs confirmation of demand In some ways, the market has become irrational in how it's treating AMD's and Nvidia's stocks. While AMD is valued at a major premium, Nvidia trades for a mere 24 times forward earnings. It's valued at this level despite growing much faster than AMD.

AMD Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) data by YCharts

That trend is expected to last through at least Q2, with analysts expecting nearly 100% growth from Nvidia during Q2. With Nvidia expected to grow at a faster pace, it may seem odd that it has the lower valuation, but that's how the market is pricing the stock. The primary concern with Nvidia's stock is what data center demand will look like during the next few years. If AMD posts strong results and indicates that AI hyperscalers are placing even more orders than expected, then Nvidia stock could skyrocket, because that's the demand confirmation the market has been waiting for.

We'll see what happens with these two stocks after AMD's announcement, but I think a bad quarter for AMD could sink both stocks, while an as-expected quarter could sink AMD but leave Nvidia's stock unaffected. Overall, I think Nvidia is the much better value here, and there is the potential for an even greater reward due to its cheaper valuation versus AMD's. Both are still worth following, but I think Nvidia is the only one worth investing in at this time due to its higher expected growth and a much lower valuation. AMD isn't a bad company by any means, but its stock has gotten far ahead of its business.

Shares of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) have been looking for a big needle-moving catalyst for quite some time now. And while this year’s version of GTC was absolutely packed, with some intriguing surprises, nothing was quite enough to charge a breakout. Just when Nvidia finally broke past its ceiling of resistance, the semiconductor trade got slapped with some pretty nasty turbulence.

With a brutal technical setup for the semis and growing odds of an interest rate hike (maybe two), courtesy of new Fed chair Kevin Warsh, it’s looking like investors who are up big and in a rush to book their gains before the latest dip into a bear market has the chance to get worse.

Of course, past plunges were met with V-shaped bounces, but, after several failed attempts to climb back, it’s finally looking like things are ready to roll over. With Nvidia pulling the curtain on a new AI model named Cosmos 3 Edge, the GPU titan looks ready to make a massive leap into the realm of physical AI and robotics.

Indeed, Nvidia’s new AI model isn’t just another large language model (LLM); it’s a generative world foundation model (WFM), and one that looks seriously impressive and perhaps underestimated by a market that’s selling anything tied to chips indiscriminately. Of course, time will tell how long it takes for Nvidia’s latest world model to nudge the shares higher. For the bulls, I think a semi sell-off, one that drags down Nvidia, could open a window to buy at a discount, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in shares in some number of years.

Physical AI is coming, and it might hold the next “ChatGPT moment” We’ve heard Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang talk up the physical AI opportunity before and how it could be in for a “ChatGPT moment,” so to speak. In my view, Cosmos 3 Edge is a big deal, as the company looks to power into an entirely different kind of market while most investors are buying into an AI bubble thesis, viewing Nvidia as a peaking cyclical whose best days are numbered, rather than a firm that’s already ready to move onto the next big thing.

In a past piece, I highlighted Nvidia’s efforts on tailoring its chips for the age of orbital data centers. And while it’s hard to grasp how big that opportunity is, I do think that physical AI stands out as much timelier.

Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.

Of course, it’s hard to make sense of what Jensen Huang’s up to in Japan as he meets up with the nation’s brightest minds in AI and robotics.

As a growing number of firms, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), which has a rumored desktop robot in the works, take robotics seriously, I do think that analysts will have every reason to revisit the drawing board, perhaps with major upside revisions as we all gain a better grasp of what the earlier days of the rise of physical AI and robotics entails, not only at the warehouse but in the home.

What makes Cosmos 3 such a standout, in my view, is its profoundly impressive next-frame prediction, its absurd speed of adaptation, and, perhaps most exciting, its open-source nature, which could make Nvidia’s models the foundation that future robotics innovators build off of.

The bottom line Whenever robots take off, Nvidia’s ecosystem looks like it’ll be hard to top, especially given that rapid frame prediction and adaptation are key question marks standing in the way of broader adoption. As Jensen Huang collaborates with leading innovators in Japan, my bet is that Nvidia is poised to get a considerable second wind in the next two to four years.

The timeline of physical AI’s ascent is uncertain, but if you believe Jensen Huang, I do think that the shares look too cheap, especially if physical AI and the Cosmos platform wind up being the next big catalyst.

Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

The current state of Nvidia's stock (NVDA 2.43%) makes little sense on the surface. Despite reporting 85% yearly revenue growth in its latest quarter, the stock sells for just 32 times earnings, the same as the S&P 500's average P/E ratio.

Some of that may have to do with the gains of nearly 1,700% since the fall of 2022, or the implied growth limitations of its $5.1 trillion market cap when considering the law of large numbers. However, another possible explanation is the unprecedented spending on AI and the historical tendency for such spending sprees to end in disaster.

Admittedly, investors do not know whether the ghosts of events past are hampering the present growth of the chip stock. Still, even if it is true, should investors care? Let's take a closer look.

Image source: Nvidia.

Historical precedent and Nvidia Indeed, this historical precedent is not one investors should dismiss. Experienced investors might remember how the internet spending boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s gave way to the dot-com bust. Looking further back, the boom in automobile spending in the 1920s ended with the Great Depression.

Big tech's AI spending seems reminiscent of such spending sprees. Key hyperscalers pledged to spend $725 billion on capital expenditures (capex) alone. Much of that spending has gone to Nvidia hardware, as the company generated $81.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 (ended April 26).

Also, analysts forecast an 82% revenue surge for fiscal 2027, though they also predict growth slowing to a 41% revenue increase for fiscal 2028.

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One has to assume that the AI boom will not go on forever, and that slower growth could be a sign of further slowing in later years.

However, Nvidia's massive size may partially explain that slowdown, as the higher percentage gains are more difficult to sustain as enterprises grow larger.

Additionally, Nvidia's forward valuation of 24 makes it appear too cheap to ignore, and the forward one-year P/E ratio of 17 would arguably seem reasonable even in an AI bust. Thus, even if slowing growth causes a pullback, the decline would likely not be long-term.

Should investors stay with Nvidia? Amid its growth and valuation, investors should not worry about history undermining the Nvidia investment thesis.

From what is known about the history of boom cycles, investors should assume that the AI boom will end at some point and should invest accordingly.

Nonetheless, the current state of Nvidia appears to insulate the stock from such an occurrence. Investors should expect slower growth after fiscal 2027, though revenue growth appears robust for as far as one can reasonably predict.

Moreover, Nvidia's forward multiples are so low that they already seem to factor in such a slowdown. Although investors should not rule out the possibility of a near-term pullback and less stock price appreciation than in the past, Nvidia should remain safe even if the history of tech boom cycles points to pain later.

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If you bought YieldMax NVDA Option Income Strategy ETF (NYSEARCA:NVDY) to ride NVIDIA‘s (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) rocket while collecting a fat monthly check, the fund is quietly clipping both sides of your ticket. It charges you more than nine times what a plain index ETF costs, and it hands the underlying stock’s biggest up-moves to the option buyers on the other side of its trades.

What You’re Actually Paying NVDY’s fact sheet lists a gross and net expense ratio of 1.09%. On a $10,000 stake, that is roughly $109 a year flowing out of your NAV before a single option premium hits the account. Compound that against a mainstream, cheap alternative like the Invesco QQQ Trust or the iShares Semiconductor ETF, and the drag stops looking like a rounding error. Over 10 years, a 1.09% annual fee on $10,000 quietly removes more than $1,000 of ending value versus a low-cost peer, before you even discuss the options overlay.

The comparison gets sharper against just owning the underlying. NVIDIA stock is up 28.72% over the past year and 13.25% year to date through July 10, 2026. NVDY, by comparison, returned 27.94% over the past year and 11.38% year to date. Those gaps are the covered call cap showing up in the price chart, on top of the fee.

The Part the Factsheet Doesn’t Highlight Look inside the fund and the marketing story frays. As of May 19, 2026, only 11.5% of net assets sit in NVIDIA common stock. 20.6% is parked in U.S. Treasury securities. The N-PORT snapshot from April 30, 2026 shows an even more extreme cash tilt, with Treasury bills making up roughly 94.9% of net assets and NVIDIA exposure delivered through offsetting long and short options rather than shares.

That structure has two costs the factsheet does not spell out. First, the short calls cap your upside. On every big NVIDIA rip, someone else exercises against the fund and takes the gain above the strike, which is why NVDA can post 28.72% in a year while NVDY trails. Second, the fund’s income is a blend of option premiums and Treasury coupons, not pure NVIDIA dividends. NVIDIA itself pays only $0.25 a quarter after its June 2026 hike. The rest of NVDY’s high distribution is manufactured, and manufactured income has historically included return-of-capital and short-term gains that get taxed as ordinary income in a taxable account.

There is also transaction drag. Rolling multiple short and long NVIDIA calls week after week, visible in the July 17, 2026 expiration with 997,144 call contracts of open interest, generates bid-ask friction that never appears in the 1.09% headline.

The Cheaper Mirror If the goal is NVIDIA exposure, holding NVDA directly costs nothing in fund fees and preserves the full upside. If the goal is diversified AI exposure with a lower expense ratio, broad tech and semiconductor ETFs run at a fraction of NVDY’s 1.09%. The trade-off is clear: you give up the loud monthly distribution and accept price appreciation as your return. NVDY sells the reverse trade, and NVDY holders paid for it in the one-year gap between the fund and its underlying.

What This Means for You NVDY is a specific bet: swap a chunk of NVIDIA’s upside for a smoother, front-loaded income stream, and pay 1.09% a year for someone to run the options desk. The question worth asking before your next contribution is whether that monthly check, after fees, taxes, and the capped upside on a stock still compounding at 955.75% over five years, is actually paying you, or paying the structure.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Nvidia (NVDA, Financials), the chipmaker behind many of the systems powering artificial intelligence, is widening its reach across Japan's largest industries.Du

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NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) has spent the last two months digesting a strong Q1 earnings report, with the back half of fiscal 2027 looking constructive. Bank of America has flagged Nvidia’s networking silicon as the next multi-billion-dollar business inside the data center, and our model agrees the market is not fully pricing it in.

Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for NVDA is $261.11, implying 23.28% upside from $211.80. Our recommendation is buy, with high confidence.

24/7 Wall St. Price Target Summary Metric Value Current Price $211.80 24/7 Wall St. Price Target $261.11 Upside 23.28% Recommendation BUY Confidence Level 90% A Summer Reset That Reopened the Runway NVDA is up 7.55% in the past week and 13.7% year to date, though shares sit roughly 28% below the $236.26 52-week high.

Q1 FY2027, reported on May 20, 2026, delivered: revenue of $81.615 billion grew 85.23% year over year, non-GAAP EPS came in at $1.87 versus $1.7738 consensus, and management guided Q2 to $91.0 billion. Data center networking alone was $14.8 billion, up 199% year over year. That is the line item Bank of America keeps circling.

Why Bulls See $300 and Beyond The bull case rests on three levers. First, networking scaled from roughly $7.25 billion in Q2 FY26 to $14.8 billion last quarter; Bank of America’s $20B business framing is not aggressive at that trajectory.

Second, supply commitments hit $119 billion, up from $50.3 billion two quarters ago, effectively pre-signing demand.

Third, capital return: an $80 billion buyback authorization landed in May on top of the $38.5 billion remaining.

Jensen Huang stated: “The buildout of AI factories, the largest infrastructure expansion in human history, is accelerating at extraordinary speed.” The Street’s $301.62 average target, backed by 48 Buy ratings, sits within reach if Blackwell 300 and Vera Rubin ramp cleanly (a scenario The Next Nvidia Playbook has been mapping).

What Could Go Wrong Q2 guidance explicitly excludes China data center compute, and forward revenue was zero from H20 shipments this quarter versus $4.6 billion a year earlier. A prolonged export freeze caps the top line. Beta of 2.211 means any hyperscaler capex pause hits NVDA harder than most.

Insiders have been net sellers across 26 recent transactions. The counterfactual: the $4.5B H20 charge that crushed year-ago margins is gone, gross margin expanded to 75%, and free cash flow of $48.55 billion in a single quarter absorbs macro noise. A bear case scenario lands near $227.02, still above current levels.

How NVIDIA Compares to AMD and Broadcom Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) is the direct GPU competitor. AMD’s Q1 FY26 data center revenue of $5.78 billion grew 57% year over year, but NVDA’s data center segment is more than $75 billion in a single quarter. AMD trades at a trailing P/E near 206, making NVDA’s 32 multiple look pedestrian.

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) is the custom accelerator and AI networking counterpoint. AVGO printed $10.8 billion in AI semiconductor revenue last quarter, up 143%, and guided Q3 AI to $16.0 billion. It validates the size of the networking pie rather than shrinking NVDA’s slice.

Company Forward P/E Latest Qtr Rev Growth NVIDIA 24 85.2% AMD ~35 37.9% Broadcom ~40 47.9% The peer set makes our $261.11 target look conservative.

Our Take on NVIDIA at Current Levels Our 24/7 Wall St. price target of $261.11 is a buy at 90% confidence. Networking is real, compounding at triple digits, and the market is still valuing NVDA on compute alone.

The setup looks constructive if hyperscaler capex guides stay firm through the next TSMC report. The thesis weakens if China export policy tightens further and Q2 revenue prints below the $91 billion guide. Neither looks likely right now.

Here is where NVDA could trade if execution holds.

Year 24/7 Wall St. Price Target 2026 $235 2027 $266 2028 $301 2029 $341 2030 $386 These projections assume NVIDIA sustains data center dominance and networking scales as guided. Significant upside would come from an accelerated Vera Rubin cycle; downside from a sustained hyperscaler capex reset.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shakes hands with an attendee after the media Q&A session during Nvidia/Japan AI Ecosystem Reception in Tokyo on July 16, 2026. AI-powered robots for use in shipbuilding, the Japanese firm said on July 16 during a visit to Tokyo by the US chip giant's CEO Jensen Huang. (Photo by Philip FONG / AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

This article was written by Doug Nathman, with research by his team at Trefis.

The company has reduced its commentary regarding the multi-billion-dollar issue related to China that previously dominated their discussions, and what they are focusing on now indicates a substantial change in where the company's growth must stem from.

With NVIDIA (NVDA) stock still trading close to all-time highs following an impressive 62% surge over the past two years, it’s easy to lose sight of the significance behind record-setting figures. The latest quarter was consistent with this trend, showcasing data center revenue skyrocketing by 92% compared to the previous year. However, the most significant indicator for an investor isn’t always the most pronounced statistic. It’s the issue that was once a major headline matter and has now faded to a mere footnote. For NVIDIA, that issue pertains to China.

The Multi-Billion Dollar Issue That Became Less VisibleNot long ago, dealing with U.S. export regulations concerning its China-specific chips was a key narrative. Management was clear about the financial impact, indicating they were “unable to ship $2.5 billion in H20 revenue during the first quarter” of last year. It was a clearly articulated, significant obstacle. Currently, this topic is less frequently mentioned. The issue remains present; during the latest earnings call, the company acknowledged it is “not forecasting any revenue from China data center compute in our outlook.” The crisis has been addressed by effectively writing off this market. The clamor has subsided, yielding to a serene acceptance of a new reality.

The New $200 Billion Growth Driver Taking Its PlaceThis calm was facilitated by the vast scope of what NVIDIA is currently emphasizing: CPUs. The company has shifted dramatically, reorienting its future with a significant new initiative. Management is now promoting its Vera CPU, stating it “opens up a completely new $200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have yet to penetrate.” More specifically, they have announced “visibility to almost $20 billion in total CPU revenue this year.” The focal point has shifted. The narrative has transitioned from defending a struggling GPU market to aggressively pursuing an entirely new one, with the company now aiming to establish itself as the “world’s leading CPU supplier.”

The Silence Has Dual ImplicationsThe evaluation here is mixed but leans towards a reassuring outlook. It is troubling that a substantial growth market was effectively lost, a reality reflected in the company's overall revenue growth slowing from its three-year average. Losing a market like China comes with consequences. However, the company’s response demonstrates remarkable strategic flexibility. Instead of fixating on the loss, management has introduced a new growth avenue in CPUs that, according to their figures, vastly exceeds the revenue setback. The pivot is bold and ambitious. The critical point to monitor now is the implementation: anticipate the solid figure on CPU revenue next quarter to determine if this new narrative fulfills its multi-billion-dollar potential.

This Is Not The NVIDIA You Thought You OwnedThis realization is striking. The NVIDIA you believe you possess, the reigning GPU champion, has subtly transformed into a different investment. It is now a comprehensive systems company whose future growth heavily relies on dominating the CPU market, a transition necessitated by a geopolitical barrier it could no longer surmount. Recognizing that transformation required paying attention to the silence.

And for those interested in the semiconductor sector, rather than being influenced by what one company might not disclose, a semiconductor ETF like SMH provides coverage of that specific industry.

NVDA Has Experienced A 66% Decline From Its Peak BeforeWhen management leaves inquiries unanswered, the uncertainty weighs most heavily on those holding significant amounts of the stock. NVDA has seen a decline of 66% from its peak in the past five years, and a drop of this magnitude feels very different when one position constitutes a large portion of your wealth.

Understanding the implications of a repeat decline on your net worth is precisely what the Trefis Wealth team analyzes, utilizing the same rules-based systematic discipline found in our High Quality Portfolio. Request a free vulnerability audit of your major positions.

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I keep hitting the buy button on NVIDIA because of one policy decision, and I want to be blunt about it: the 25x quarterly dividend jump from $0.01 to $0.25 paired with a fresh $80 billion buyback authorization on top of the roughly $39 billion still remaining is the single clearest signal a management team can send a long-term holder. That is a company telling me it plans to route a large slice of its cash directly into my account for years, not a token gesture.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) is the position I keep adding to, and the capital return program is the anchor. In Q1 FY27 alone, roughly $20.0 billion went back to shareholders through repurchases and dividends. Across FY2026, the company returned $41.1 billion ($40.1B in buybacks plus $974M in dividends). That is real capital, coming out of real cash flow, hitting the float every quarter.

The Cash Behind the Policy A buyback promise only matters if the cash exists to fund it. Here, the cash is not in doubt. FY2026 operating cash flow hit $102.7 billion and free cash flow reached $96.7 billion, with CapEx running at roughly 6% of operating cash flow. Ninety-four cents of every operating dollar is available for shareholders or reinvestment. In the most recent quarter, non-GAAP gross margin ran at 75.0%, up from 60.8% a year earlier, and revenue grew 85.23% year over year to $81.615 billion. Q2 FY27 guidance points to $91.0 billion in revenue. The balance sheet carries debt/equity of 0.073 and interest coverage of 503x. That is the profile of a company that can keep the policy running.

Why Not the Obvious Alternatives Readers reach first for Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO), or Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) with its Trainium chip. I have looked. None of them are running Data Center revenue of $75.246 billion at 92% YoY growth, or Data Center Networking at $14.8 billion growing 199%. NVIDIA’s ROE of 101.5% and ROIC of 92.2% tower over what AMD or Broadcom post. Amazon’s Trainium is a multibillion-dollar business, real competition, but Amazon itself deploys NVIDIA in AWS at scale. If we are talking about a chip supplier returning cash while growing 85.2% on an $81.61B revenue base, there is one name. (For readers exploring the broader picture, 24/7 Wall St. has a useful primer on stocks powering the AI buildout.)

The Real Risk China is the risk I do not wave away. Q1 FY27 saw zero H20 shipments to China, versus $4.6 billion in the year-ago quarter, and Q2 guidance assumes no China Data Center compute revenue at all. Losing that market is a real hole. It has not changed my thesis because the company grew Data Center revenue 92% anyway, and total supply commitments of $119.0 billion tell me the demand outside China is absorbing everything NVIDIA can ship.

What Keeps the Buy Button Active When a business generating $96.7 billion in free cash flow commits roughly $119 billion of authorized capital to shrinking its own share count, every share I hold gets a slightly larger claim on future earnings without me lifting a finger. That is the compounding engine I want in a retirement account, and it is why my next buy order is already written.

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Nokia (NOK 6.00%) used to make smartphones, but the stock's 130% rally over the past year has nothing to do with those consumer products. The company has become a major part of the AI build-out thanks to a new technology that most people don't know about: artificial intelligence radio access networks (AI-RAN).

AI-RAN helps tech giants break through the latency limitations of AI data centers and enables the creation of micro-data centers that scale real-time AI inference. This technology may soon become a hot topic with investors, just as memory chips have recently.

Image source: Getty Images.

Nokia has Nvidia's backing Nokia isn't posting impressive overall growth rates right now. It delivered only 4% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1, but its small AI and cloud segment grew by 49%. Demand for optical networking hardware to go into AI data centers has contributed to the stock's rally, but AI-RAN may be the golden opportunity moving forward.

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In its most recent report, management highlighted that AI inference demand is growing faster than AI model training demand, and those workloads will require AI-RAN to operate more effectively in real-time scenarios.

The leading hardware player in the AI boom, Nvidia, has taken notice. In October, the chipmaker announced it was making a $1 billion investment in Nokia as part of a partnership that will support the telecom sector's upgrade to AI-native 5G-advanced and 6G networks.

"AI-RAN will revolutionize telecommunications -- a generational platform shift that empowers the United States to regain global leadership in this vital infrastructure technology," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said when announcing the investment. "Together with Nokia and America's telecom ecosystem, we're igniting this revolution." 

Huang may have more influence on the AI build-out than anyone else. His assertion that AI-RAN will revolutionize telecommunications is a long-term bullish indicator for Nokia.

AI-RAN revenue should arrive soon and quickly surge The potential of this technology isn't reflected in Nokia's earnings yet. Some investors have been accumulating shares regardless, anticipating a megacycle for this innovation. Nokia said in its Q1 press release that it is on track to launch customer trials later this year, with 10 customers publicly committed to working with it on them.

Telecom giants are among those customers, and backing from Nvidia could speed up adoption and commercialization. Since AI-RAN is designed to upgrade and optimize existing cell towers, there is a large market opportunity. Market research firm Dell'Oro Group anticipates that cumulative AI-RAN spending will reach $35 billion in five years, suggesting rapid growth is coming.

Since AI-RAN solves major bottlenecks for the AI industry, it could translate into higher margins for Nokia. That would be a welcome development -- the company's margins have been hovering below 3% for several quarters.

While the first phase of the artificial intelligence (AI) trend was all about large language model (LLM) training, the next phase is increasingly becoming about inference -- putting those trained models to work on real-world tasks. This is expected to become the larger of the two markets eventually.

Chipmakers Nvidia (NVDA 2.19%), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 3.48%), and Cerebras Systems (CBRS 4.21%) are all looking to become the leader in powering inference workloads. Excelling in those computing tasks tends to be more about quick access to memory than raw computing power, and all three are taking different approaches to tackle this issue. As such, let's dig into which looks like the best inference semiconductor stock to buy right now.

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Nvidia has long been the AI infrastructure leader: Its graphics processing units (GPUs) have been the main chips used to train AI models. The company has developed a huge moat in this arena by popularizing its CUDA software platform with developers. Most foundational AI code was written in CUDA and optimized specifically for Nvidia's chips.

Inference is a whole other ballgame, though, and the company "acquired" Groq and its language processing units (LPUs) and incorporated them into its CUDA ecosystem to beef up its inference offering. LPUs use a small amount of on-chip SRAM (static random-access memory) to increase inference speeds. Nvidia has essentially created full server racks designed specifically for inference that use a combination of LPUs and GPUs. GPUs packaged with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) take care of the prefill phase of understanding a user's prompt, while LPUs handle the decode phase of giving a response. Since LPUs use SRAM, they can reply with almost zero lag.

Cerebras

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Like Nvidia, Cerebras is also using on-chip SRAM to help tackle inference workloads and improve speeds. However, it is doing it in a very different way. Because SRAM is physically bulky, each Nvidia LPU uses a small amount; to handle these workloads, many LPUs need to be interconnected in a huge cluster. Cerebras, on the other hand, has created giant wafer-sized chips about the size of dinner plates that put many standard chips' worth of hardware onto a single slab of silicon. The result is a chip that is 6 times faster than Nvidia's LPUs and 15 times faster than its GPUs.

However, wafer-scale chips come with their own issues. To avoid the impact of costly defects, Cerebras adds extra cores its chips so they can work around any defective areas. Its chips also need special cooling and power management, and as such, Cerebras only sells or rents them out as part of its complete end-to-end server rack CS-3 system. This ultimately makes its offering an expensive premium solution.

That said, the company won a $20 billion deal with OpenAI and also has inked a deal with Amazon Web Services. This could help bring the company's systems into the mainstream.

AMD

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Another company looking to gain ground in the inference market is AMD. While it doesn't use on-chip SRAM like Nvidia and Cerebras, its chiplet design allows more memory to be packaged with its GPUs. Meanwhile, its recent acquisition of memory optimization software company MEXT gives AMD a cost-effective way to increase effective memory capacity and reduce costs.

Due to the ongoing AI infrastructure build-out, high bandwidth memory (HBM) is in short supply, and DRAM prices have been surging, increasing the costs of building data centers. MEXT's systems reduce the need for HBM  by automatically offloading seldom-accessed data to much cheaper flash storage. MEXT's edge is its predictive AI engine, which analyzes memory access patterns in real time. This allows it to anticipate what data an application will need next and pull it back into HBM right before it is requested. With the integration of MEXT's offerings into its portfolio, AMD can now offer customers full servers dedicated to inference that can save them money.

In addition to its opportunity in the inference space, AMD is also set to benefit from the expected rapid growth of agentic AI, as it is a leading maker of central processing units (CPUs) for AI data centers. Because agentic AI workloads require far more CPUs than other AI processing tasks, the ratio of GPUs to CPUs in data centers -- which was recently about 8 to 1 -- is expected to shrink to around 1 to 1 due to the rise of agentic AI. 

Image source: Getty Images.

The verdict Nvidia is a great stock trading at an attractive valuation, and Cerebras has an opportunity to turn the inference market on its head with its unique wafer-scale engines. However, AMD is the stock I like the most here, as the company is riding two big waves with inference and agentic AI. Its solution is also simpler, and it looks poised to make some nice inroads in this market. It already has some big inference deals in place with OpenAI and Meta Platforms, and there are rumors that Anthropic is about to become a big customer.

With explosive revenue growth potential ahead, AMD could be the biggest winner of the AI inference era.

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It really does feel like shares of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) have finally reached a bit of a ceiling, and while the new high bar is set just north of $235 per share, it’s not all that much higher than the consolidation channel that the stock spent most of the past year hovering around. Like it or not, Nvidia stock is delivering a sliver more than market returns this year, and that’s despite what I believe is a wave of positive new developments.

With the Vera Rubin boom still up ahead, with Nvidia’s top boss Jensen Huang shooting down recent reports that there were delays in production, it feels like the one big catalyst is ready to finally deliver for the $5.2 trillion titan.

Nvidia’s path going into the second half As it stands, Vera Rubin hasn’t been delayed; it’s actually poised to deliver “giant amounts” of chips, and that may very well set the stage for blowout quarters to come. If you’ve been around Nvidia stock for more than a year, though, you’ll know that even a strong quarterly showing is no guarantee of a soaring stock.

The expectations bar still seems quite high, even though shares trade at a significant discount to the better-performing peers in the semi scene.

At 32.6 times trailing price-to-earnings (P/E), it’s clear that the seemingly low price of admission isn’t enough to convince investors to jump in, especially given the massive uncertainties surrounding whether or not the hyperscalers will keep buying after they’re done building AI data centers and what the risks could be if it’s discovered that there’s been significant overinvestment in three years from now.

Perhaps Nvidia shares can’t be cheap enough, given the cyclicality of the sector, no matter how many blowout quarters the firm posts or how many circular deals the firm makes to expand its dominance across AI layers that go beyond just hardware. Perhaps the biggest wild cards that could send Nvidia stock into a roaring bull market are the potential sales opportunity in China.

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GPUs sold for space data centers? If a sales boom in China sounds too far-fetched, perhaps Nvidia’s role in supplying GPUs to Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ:SPCX) as it begins work on its orbital data center buildout might act as a surprise needle-mover that sell-side analysts haven’t yet baked in fully.

Of course, it’s really hard to analyze just how impactful SpaceX’s space-based data centers will be and what the implications could be for the partners it does business with. Indeed, there just have to be more beneficiaries than just SpaceX as the firm builds AI infrastructure in the skies above.

In my view, SpaceX’s orbital data center buildout is a real catalyst, one that could help Nvidia sell even more products. Jensen Huang and company might not be well-positioned to sell more GPUs, but software and other infrastructure that goes into something like a Starmind AI satellite.

Any way you look at it, Nvidia is treating the new market very seriously and, arguably, they’ve already set a launchpad, with space-ready Vera Rubin chips, CUDA software (meant for operating in orbit), and more. As Elon Musk moves at lightspeed with orbital data centers, perhaps the uplifting effects for Nvidia could come sooner rather than later.

The bottom line It’s tough to gauge how the space economy will jolt Nvidia’s pocketbook, especially considering AI1 satellites will feature interchangeable hardware. Once Terafab is up and running, SpaceX will, in due time, probably swap out third-party chips with its own. Either way, though, Nvidia is ready to bridge the gap.

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SummaryNvidia Corporation remains a dominant AI platform leader, with CEO Jensen Huang directly refuting recent Vera Rubin and Kyber production delay rumors.Kyber rack innovations are set to double GPU density and drive the next phase of NVDA’s AI revenue expansion, with no confirmed shipment delays.Despite delays, Nvidia could likely beat H2 data center revenue expectations by 20%. An on-track Kyber roadmap would boost the beat magnitude even further.NVDA shares are trading at forward P/E multiples near five-year lows, despite expectations for 88% forward EPS and 82% revenue growth.I reiterate a bullish rating for NVDA stock, viewing the current valuation as an attractive entry point amid strong growth and dismissed delay concerns. J Studios/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Investment Thesis Nvidia Corporation’s (NVDA) production delay "rumor mill" returned after a 24-month hiatus, testing the GPU platform maker’s resilience as a dominant leader of the AI platformization era.

Last month, reports began to surface

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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of AMD, AVGO either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

Chinese rival to Micron could shake up the chip market, U.S. will put 25% tariff on some Brazilian goods, United Airlines raises full-year guidance, and more news to start your day.

Apple has a long history with the market-cap crown. In August 2018, the iPhone maker became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a market cap of $1 trillion. The company added to its resume, becoming the first to reach $2 trillion and $3 trillion in August 2020 and January 2022, respectively. However, the advent of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution sparked a surge in Nvidia (NVDA +0.29%) stock, which became the first to reach $4 trillion in July 2025 and $5 trillion in October 2025.

Apple languished for much of last year, as tariff-related fears and persistent inflation weighed on investor sentiment. However, iPhone sales -- the backbone of its business -- continued to trudge higher. As a result, Apple has gained 20% thus far in 2026, doubling the 10% rise of the S&P 500.

I predict the iPhone maker will soon overtake Nvidia to once again wear the crown as the world's most valuable company. Here's why.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

The AI wildcardThe persistent adoption of AI has strained the availability of flash memory and storage chips. Specifically, significant demand for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and NAND flash memory chips has far outstripped supply, sending prices for these processors soaring. The impact has gone beyond AI, reaching into the smartphone industry.

China is feeling the heat, as smartphone shipments fell 4.3% year over year, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of declines, according to a report by global market intelligence firm IDC Global. The report noted that "Rising memory and component costs pushed most Android vendors to raise prices, which cooled upgrade demand."

Customers in China, faced with higher prices for bargain smartphones, opted to upgrade to iPhones, as sales grew 24% year over year, the highest growth rate among all vendors in China, and one of only two to generate growth.

Just this week, Chinese regulators approved Apple Intelligence for deployment on iPhones in the country, marking the end of a two-year licensing process. The company joined forces with Alibaba and Baidu, part of China's requirement that foreign companies collaborate with local partners. This could attract more users to Apple's platform.

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A winning strategyThe company has long used its supply chain acumen to its advantage over the competition, and this instance is no different. The company has resisted price increases on its iPhones -- despite higher input costs -- thereby stealing market share from rivals, who were forced to raise prices.

China has historically accounted for 18% of Apple's sales. By delaying price increases as long as possible, Apple is gaining market share, resulting in a larger installed base for its services, apps, and accessories. Moreover, iPhone users are more likely to adopt other Apple products, in a winning strategy for the company.

Investor sentiment continues to weigh on Nvidia as concerns linger. Any suggestion that AI adoption is slowing could be devastating for the chipmaker -- despite the company's record-breaking results. As an Nvidia shareholder, I have no plans to sell, as the long-term future looks bright.

That said, I suspect strong sales in China and the dawn of Apple Intelligence are the catalysts that could help the iPhone maker overtake Nvidia's market cap to recapture the crown.

Danny Vena, CPA has positions in Apple, Baidu, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple, Baidu, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Alibaba Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

News Summary:

NVIDIA to partner with Noetra Corp. to build the NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs to deliver 140 megawatts of data center capacity based on the NVIDIA DSX platform.The initiative, supported by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), will provide the computing foundation for Japan’s FRONTia Project to strengthen the country’s ecosystem across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and more.AI factory to create open multimodal foundation models to develop AI agents, digital twins, robotics and physical AI applications. TOKYO, July 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NVIDIA today announced it is working with Noetra Corp. to launch an NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory with 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs for national physical AI. Supported by Japan’s AI and industry leaders, the initiative marks the world’s first national AI infrastructure for physical AI, strengthening the country’s AI ecosystem across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, telecommunications and more.

The new AI factory, established by Noetra, will be architected with NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks using the NVIDIA DSX™ platform, connected and scaled with NVIDIA Spectrum-X™ Ethernet networking. It will enable the development of open multimodal foundation models that power AI agents, digital twins, robotics and other physical AI applications.

The NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory will provide the computing foundation for Japan’s FRONTia Project, which refers to the project titled, “Development of Multimodal Foundation Models with a View to AI Robotics and Physical AI,” launched by METI. The project brings together the country’s manufacturing expertise, real-world industrial data and global technology leaders to develop highly reliable multimodal foundation models for physical AI.

The pretrained weights of Noetra’s multimodal foundation models will be made broadly available to domestic model developers and enterprises alongside software such as NVIDIA Nemotron™, NVIDIA Cosmos™, NVIDIA Isaac™ GR00T open models, NVIDIA NeMo™ libraries and more. This will accelerate the development of agentic AI and physical AI applications.

“Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it is building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is honored to partner with Japan and its industrial leaders to build the AI infrastructure that will power the country’s industries, its economy and a new generation of innovation.”

“Japan has launched the FRONTia Project, which will serve as the core of the country’s physical AI ecosystem,” said Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry. “By fostering collaboration between Japan and leading global innovators — including NVIDIA — and leveraging Japan’s strengths, such as its onsite expertise and manufacturing technology infrastructure, we will build highly reliable multimodal foundation models and contribute to solving global social challenges.”

“Bringing physical AI into the real world requires enormous computing, data and foundational technologies — challenges no single company can solve alone,” said Hironobu Tamba, CEO of Noetra. “Together with partners across Japan and around the world, Noetra will advance Japan-developed multimodal foundation models and accelerate the deployment of physical AI across Japanese industries by broadly sharing the results of our research.”

Built on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI factory architecture, the AI factory will deliver 140 megawatts of data center capacity combined with the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform, NVIDIA BlueField® DPUs, and tightly codesigned silicon, systems and software to provide breakthrough AI performance, lower token costs and massive scale for frontier AI training.

NVIDIA DSX provides a reference design and platform for AI factories, helping infrastructure builders accelerate time to production, increase token throughput per megawatt and operate with greater reliability and efficiency.

Advancing Japan’s Physical AI Ambitions
Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, sets a goal for the country to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, representing an estimated $133 billion opportunity. To help achieve the goal, METI is advancing a multimodal foundation model program for robotics and physical AI as part of Japan’s broader industrial AI policy.

As the AI factory expands, it will support training trillion-parameter-scale AI models, giving organizations across Japan access to one of the world’s most advanced AI environments and laying the foundation for the next era of intelligent manufacturing and robotics.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.

For further information, contact:
Kristin Uchiyama
Corporate Communications
NVIDIA Corporation
[email protected]

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: Japan building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution; NVIDIA to partner with Japan and its industrial leaders to build the AI infrastructure that will power the country’s industries, its economy and a new generation of innovation; expectations with respect to growth, performance, availability, and benefits of NVIDIA’s products, services and technologies, and related trends and drivers; expectations with respect to NVIDIA’s third party arrangements, including with its collaborators and partners; expectations with respect to technology developments, and related trends and drivers; projected market growth and trends; expectations with respect to AI and related industries; and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are subject to the “safe harbor” created by those sections based on management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic and political conditions; NVIDIA’s reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test NVIDIA’s products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to NVIDIA’s existing products and technologies; market acceptance of NVIDIA’s products or NVIDIA’s partners’ products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of NVIDIA’s products or technologies when integrated into systems; NVIDIA’s ability to realize the potential benefits of business investments or acquisitions; and changes in applicable laws and regulations, as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company’s website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

© 2026 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, BlueField, DSX, Nemotron, NVIDIA Cosmos, NVIDIA Isaac, NVIDIA NeMo and NVIDIA Spectrum-X are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/322eb6fb-fe24-4ea5-a123-2c076a6fa629

NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI Factory for Japan Physical AI NVIDIA today announced it is working with Noetra Corp. to launch an NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factory wit...

The AI factory will provide the computing foundation to develop multimodal foundation models for physical AI.

News Summary:

NVIDIA introduces Cosmos 3 Edge for on-device vision reasoning and robot policy deployment on NVIDIA Jetson Thor platforms, and NVIDIA Metropolis libraries built on NVIDIA Cosmos for agentic vision AI development.Japan’s physical AI ecosystem leaders AIRoA, FANUC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Kubota, NEC, SoftBank Corp., Sony Group Corporation and Yaskawa Electric intend to join the NVIDIA Cosmos Coalition to help build open frontier physical AI models.Fujitsu is exploring the development of a collaborative control platform for physical AI, with FANUC, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries integrating NVIDIA technologies, while Japanese manufacturers and physical AI leaders including Enactic, Honda R&D, GROOVE X, Mitsui & Co, OMRON, Shimizu Corporation and Telexistence are building on NVIDIA’s physical AI stack.
TOKYO, July 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NVIDIA today announced that Japan’s physical AI leaders are building on the NVIDIA Cosmos™, NVIDIA Isaac™, NVIDIA Metropolis and NVIDIA Jetson™ platforms to accelerate the deployment of intelligent machines across manufacturing, mobility, infrastructure and robotics.

NVIDIA also announced Cosmos 3 Edge, a new addition to the NVIDIA Cosmos 3 open world model family, that brings frontier capabilities to NVIDIA Jetson, helping embodied systems see, reason in real time and predict robot actions locally.

Physical AI is bringing intelligence into machines, facilities and infrastructure, helping industries automate complex work and extend human expertise. Japan’s strengths in robotics, manufacturing, automotive, telecommunications and industrial technology give it a powerful foundation for scaling this next wave of AI.

“The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries. By combining its world-leading heritage in manufacturing, precision engineering and robotics with NVIDIA Cosmos, Isaac, Metropolis and Jetson, Japan’s innovators are building the next generation of intelligent machines. We are honored to partner with them on this journey.”

NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Edge Powers On-Device Vision Reasoning and Robot Policy
NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Edge is a 4-billion-parameter model built on NVIDIA Nemotron™ that helps robots and vision AI agents understand their surroundings, reason in real time and generate robot actions on NVIDIA edge computers.

Using the open NVIDIA Cosmos framework, developers can adapt the model for specific robots, vehicles, sensors and environments in about a day. Lightweight enough to run on edge GPUs and quickly post-train specialized world action models, Cosmos 3 Edge can be deployed across NVIDIA RTX™ GPUs, NVIDIA DGX™ systems and NVIDIA Jetson, including the newly announced T2000 and T3000 modules.

To further accelerate the development of vision AI agents, NVIDIA is also announcing new NVIDIA Metropolis libraries and skills that help developers use coding agents to build, train and operate video intelligence systems with Cosmos at least 6x faster.

Japan’s Physical AI Leaders Intend to Join NVIDIA Cosmos Coalition to Advance Open World Models
NVIDIA is expanding the NVIDIA Cosmos Coalition to Japan, bringing together world model builders, AI developers and physical AI leaders to advance open world models with Cosmos technologies.

Japan’s physical AI ecosystem leaders including AIRoA, classmethod, Enactic, FANUC, Fujitsu, GROOVE X, Hitachi, Honda R&D, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Kubota, Mitsui & Co., Mitsubishi Corp., Mujin, NEC, Preferred Networks, SoftBank Corp., Sony Group Corporation, Telexistence, TIER IV, TRON K.K., Turing and Yaskawa Electric intend to join the coalition.

Coalition members can contribute to and build on the NVIDIA Cosmos platform, which includes open models, data curation libraries, datasets and frameworks. The resulting world models will help Japanese companies test and optimize physical AI systems before deployment, shortening development cycles across factories, logistics networks, farms, construction sites, hospitals, roads and homes.

NVIDIA Physical AI Powers Momentum Across Japan’s Robotics, Manufacturing and Smart Spaces Ecosystem
Fujitsu is exploring business opportunities in physical AI with FANUC, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries. Led by Fujitsu, the initiative aims to build a collaborative control platform integrating NVIDIA’s physical AI stack to bridge digital and physical operations across all industrial sectors.

Built with Cosmos world foundation models, the open Isaac robotics development platform, NVIDIA Omniverse™ NuRec libraries and the Newton physics engine, the platform will support AI model development, digital twins, robot learning, simulation-to-real workflows and pre-deployment validation.

NEC, Hitachi, OMRON and Preferred Networks are using NVIDIA Cosmos and NVIDIA physical AI technologies to advance world models, industrial AI and physical AI R&D. SoftBank Corp. is developing a physical AI development platform built on NVIDIA Cosmos, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Isaac Sim™. The company is also advancing AI-RAN initiatives using NVIDIA AI Aerial with the aim of delivering intelligent connectivity for billions of physical AI devices.

Mujin is exploring NVIDIA Cosmos for autonomous robotics and intelligent industrial automation powered by MujinOS, while TRON K.K. is developing manufacturing data workflows for task-specific physical AI models in assembly, picking, inspection and material handling, as well as factory 3D digitization workflows.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries is applying NVIDIA physical AI technologies across healthcare, shipbuilding, transportation, aerospace and energy; Kubota is exploring Cosmos-based physical AI for autonomous agriculture and smart farming.

Enactic is fine-tuning the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T open model for elder-care semi-humanoid robots; GROOVE X is building Jetson-powered companion robots,

LOVOT; and Telexistence is applying Isaac and exploring Cosmos for retail automation.

Japan’s industry leaders are also using NVIDIA Metropolis to bring Cosmos-powered vision AI agents into physical operations: Hitachi for smart-building operations, OMRON for automated inspection and Shimizu Corporation for construction safety.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.

For further information, contact:
Quentin Nolibois
Corporate Communications
NVIDIA Corporation
[email protected]  

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: by combining its world-leading heritage in manufacturing, precision engineering and robotics with NVIDIA Cosmos, Isaac, Metropolis and Jetson, Japan’s innovators building the next generation of intelligent machines; expectations with respect to growth, performance, availability, and benefits of NVIDIA’s products, services and technologies, and related trends and drivers; expectations with respect to NVIDIA’s third party arrangements, including with its collaborators and partners; expectations with respect to technology developments, and related trends and drivers; projected market growth and trends; expectations with respect to AI and related industries; and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are subject to the “safe harbor” created by those sections based on management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic and political conditions; NVIDIA’s reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test NVIDIA’s products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to NVIDIA’s existing products and technologies; market acceptance of NVIDIA’s products or NVIDIA’s partners’ products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of NVIDIA’s products or technologies when integrated into systems; NVIDIA’s ability to realize the potential benefits of business investments or acquisitions; and changes in applicable laws and regulations, as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company’s website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

Many of the products and features described herein remain in various stages and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. The statements above are not intended to be, and should not be interpreted as a commitment, promise, or legal obligation, and the development, release, and timing of any features or functionalities described for our products is subject to change and remains at the sole discretion of NVIDIA. NVIDIA will have no liability for failure to deliver or delay in the delivery of any of the products, features or functions set forth herein.

© 2026 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, Nemotron, NVIDIA Cosmos, NVIDIA DGX, NVIDIA Isaac, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, NVIDIA Jetson, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA RTX are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability and specifications are subject to change without notice.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/1b939b87-c263-455e-bb69-6d0781da11f4

Japan’s Robotics and Manufacturing Leaders Build on NVIDIA Cosmos to Advance Physical AI Frontier NVIDIA today announced that Japan’s physical AI leaders are building on the NVIDIA Cosmos, NVIDIA Is...

If it were easy to predict stock prices, there would be far more rich people out there. Fortunately, investors can make great money by simply gauging where a stock might go in the future, based on the underlying company's growth opportunities and valuation. If you're right about the factors moving a stock, you'll probably do well, even if you don't nail the exact share price.

For example, I predict that Nvidia (NVDA +0.29%) will trade at $350 per share by 2028. Keep in mind that Nvidia's fiscal calendar ends in January. Therefore, its fiscal year 2028 ends just as the calendar year 2028 begins.

Remember, the reasons why I believe Nvidia can soar 71% higher over the next 18 months are far more important than whether the stock trades at $350, $325, or $450. As long as my prediction about Nvidia is directionally correct, investors will be happy they bought the stock. I'll unpack how I arrived at my prediction below.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

The growth engine still has fuel Nvidia has generated $253.5 billion in trailing 12-month revenue and continues to pump out breathtaking growth. The company's sales grew by 85% year over year in the first quarter of Nvidia's fiscal year 2027, driven by Grace Blackwell, its current flagship data center chip platform. Its successor, Vera Rubin, has entered full production and could begin shipping later this year.

CEO Jensen Huang has said that Nvidia anticipates $1 trillion in sales between Blackwell and Rubin through next year, a clear signal that artificial intelligence (AI) hyperscalers haven't relented from pouring billions of dollars into AI compute. Based on Wall Street estimates, Nvidia's total sales could more than double by fiscal year 2028, to approximately $555.5 billion.

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The math behind a $350 stock Analysts also estimate that Nvidia will earn $12.79 in fiscal year 2028, nearly double Nvidia's trailing 12-month earnings per share of $6.53. That seems reasonable as long as the company maintains its pricing power. A valuation of about 27 times those earnings produces that $350 share price. Keep in mind that those will be trailing 12-month earnings by January 2028. Today, Nvidia trades at 31 times its trailing earnings, so this prediction assumes its valuation will decline.

The numbers can change. Rubin consists of seven chips, forming an AI supercomputer chipset that expands Nvidia's data center footprint. There could be even more growth and upside if Rubin exceeds sales expectations. On the flip side, hyperscalers could pull back on their capital expenditures, ending this data center boom at any moment. The uncertainty is simply part of the game.

For now, Nvidia seems poised to soar on demand for Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin. If that's correct, investors probably won't care about my specific prediction, just as I said at the beginning.

AMD stock is moving. See the chart and price action here.  MI450 And Helios Mark AMD’s Rack-Level PushThe firm said AMD’s MI450 accelerators, paired with its Helios rack-scale architecture, represent "the first real shot" for the company to compete beyond individual chips and into fully integrated AI systems — a key battleground where Nvidia has built a commanding lead.

BNP analysts noted that MI450 is already sampling with lead customers and remains on track for a second-half production ramp. Early checks suggest demand is expanding beyond initial hyperscale partners and could broaden into 2027, signaling growing interest in AMD as an alternative AI supplier.

The bigger shift, however, is structural. With Helios and the integration of ZT Systems, AMD is moving toward delivering complete rack-level solutions — combining compute, networking and system design — rather than competing solely on GPU performance.

That approach mirrors Nvidia’s strategy, which has increasingly centered on tightly integrated systems like DGX and full-stack infrastructure offerings.

AMD’s Biggest Hurdle Still, BNP cautioned that AMD’s biggest hurdle is not hardware.

"Software and ecosystem remain the gating factors," the firm wrote, pointing to Nvidia’s entrenched CUDA platform, which continues to dominate AI development workflows. 

AMD’s ROCm software stack has improved but still lags in maturity and adoption, particularly after the company lost several large inference deals in 2024 and 2025 due to software limitations.

Networking and interconnect capabilities are another area where AMD trails. BNP said the company remains behind both Nvidia and Broadcom Inc. (NASADQ:AVGO) in delivering a fully optimized, scalable AI fabric — a critical component for large-scale deployments.

Despite the gaps, the firm believes MI450 and Helios could position AMD as a credible second source for hyperscalers seeking supplier diversification amid surging AI infrastructure demand.

That dynamic could be especially important as customers look to reduce reliance on Nvidia’s tightly controlled ecosystem and manage cost pressures at scale.

The TakeawayBNP’s takeaway is nuanced: AMD is still playing catch-up in AI, but MI450 may mark a turning point where it can compete not just on chips, but on entire systems — provided it can close the software gap.

Photo: Shutterstock

This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

© 2026 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Nvidia NVDA stock fell about 1.2% on Wednesday as investors weighed renewed exports of the company's H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, ongoing export control scrutiny in Washington, and fresh developments in its AI business.

The decline came despite a series of positive updates surrounding Nvidia's long-term growth prospects, including a higher price target from KeyBanc, CEO Jensen Huang's comments on next-generation AI hardware production, and a new partnership milestone with Nokia.

US trade officials confirmed that Nvidia has begun shipping H200 AI chips to China after receiving government approval under a case-by-case licensing process.

Nvidia stock regained some of the losses and was trading down 0.73% at the time of writing.

Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Nvidia had started exporting H200 chips to China, although volumes remain limited.

"There have been minimal exports of any H200s to China so far," Kessler testified, describing the initial deliveries as "very few".

According to Reuters, around 10 Chinese companies have been approved to receive advanced AI hardware from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

Those approved include Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and a unit of ZTE, with applicants required to satisfy national security requirements and submit to inspections.

The approvals triggered political debate in Washington.

Representative Gregory Meeks criticized the administration for approving advanced AI chip licenses, arguing that export controls were being used as "a bargaining chip in broader negotiations with China."

Meanwhile, Representative Bill Huizenga raised concerns that overseas subsidiaries of Chinese companies could exploit regulatory loopholes to retain advanced Nvidia Blackwell chips.

Analysts remain bullish on AI demandDespite the geopolitical uncertainty, Wall Street remained constructive on Nvidia's long-term outlook.

KeyBanc maintained its Overweight rating and raised its price target to $330 from $310.

Analyst John Vinh described Nvidia's supply outlook as "mixed but mostly positive."

The brokerage acknowledged that Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin architecture faces modest production delays related to thermal heat lid issues and HBM4 memory qualification with SK Hynix.

However, KeyBanc said it sees "minimal risk to estimates."

The firm expects Nvidia to offset any delays by increasing shipments of its B300 GPUs as demand for AI infrastructure remains strong.

Separately, Jensen Huang dismissed reports that the Vera Rubin platform had been delayed.

Speaking in Tokyo about Nvidia's role in Japan's artificial intelligence ambitions, Huang said the company's high-end AI accelerator systems remain on schedule for customer deliveries at "giant" production volumes.

Earlier this year, Huang also said Vera Rubin had entered full production using high-bandwidth memory supplied by Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology.

Nvidia also announced new AI-powered radio access network technology developed jointly with Nokia.

The companies said the new software and hardware platform is expected to become commercially available next year and could allow telecommunications operators to double the amount of data transmitted over existing spectrum by 2028.

"With Nokia, Nvidia is “transforming RAN into a planet-scale AI computer,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the statement. “This is a generational shift for operators."

The partnership forms part of Nokia's broader strategy to expand software revenue and capitalize on AI infrastructure growth beyond traditional telecommunications equipment.

Meanwhile, Nvidia continues to recover relative to the broader semiconductor sector.

Although the stock has gained 11% this year, compared with a 72% advance in the PHLX Semiconductor Index, it has recently outperformed as chip stocks pulled back.

Nvidia's market capitalization also remains above the $5 trillion mark after regaining the milestone earlier this week.

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Stock Market Jumps As Inflation Eases; IBM Warns, But Chip, Security Software Names Fly Nvidia (NVDA) stock is approaching a proper buy point as the artificial intelligence chip leader received some reassuring news this week. On Tuesday, Nvidia stock closed above its 50-day moving average line, a key support level, for the second time in the last three trading sessions. In morning trades on the stock market today, Nvidia stock hovered above that important…

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Nvidia (NVDA - Free Report) closed the last trading session at $211.8, gaining 2.1% over the past four weeks, but there could be plenty of upside left in the stock if short-term price targets set by Wall Street analysts are any guide. The mean price target of $302.55 indicates a 42.9% upside potential.

The mean estimate comprises 48 short-term price targets with a standard deviation of $52.91. While the lowest estimate of $180.00 indicates a 15% decline from the current price level, the most optimistic analyst expects the stock to surge 136.1% to reach $500.00. It's very important to note the standard deviation here, as it helps understand the variability of the estimates. The smaller the standard deviation, the greater the agreement among analysts.

While the consensus price target is highly sought after by investors, the ability and unbiasedness of analysts in setting price targets have long been questionable. And investors making investment decisions solely based on this tool would arguably do themselves a disservice.

But, for NVDA, an impressive average price target is not the only indicator of a potential upside. Strong agreement among analysts about the company's ability to report better earnings than they predicted earlier strengthens this view. While a positive trend in earnings estimate revisions doesn't gauge how much a stock could gain, it has proven to be powerful in predicting an upside.

Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise

Here's What You Should Know About Analysts' Price TargetsAccording to researchers at several universities across the globe, a price target is one of many pieces of information about a stock that misleads investors far more often than it guides. In fact, empirical research shows that price targets set by several analysts, irrespective of the extent of agreement, rarely indicate where the price of a stock could actually be heading.

While Wall Street analysts have deep knowledge of a company's fundamentals and the sensitivity of its business to economic and industry issues, many of them tend to set overly optimistic price targets. Are you wondering why?

They usually do that to drum up interest in shares of companies that their firms either have existing business relationships with or are looking to be associated with. In other words, business incentives of firms covering a stock often result in inflated price targets set by analysts.

However, a tight clustering of price targets, which is represented by a low standard deviation, indicates that analysts have a high degree of agreement about the direction and magnitude of a stock's price movement. While that doesn't necessarily mean the stock will hit the average price target, it could be a good starting point for further research aimed at identifying the potential fundamental driving forces.

That said, while investors should not entirely ignore price targets, making an investment decision solely based on them could lead to disappointing ROI. So, price targets should always be treated with a high degree of skepticism.

Why NVDA Could Witness a Solid UpsideThere has been increasing optimism among analysts lately about the company's earnings prospects, as indicated by strong agreement among them in revising EPS estimates higher. And that could be a legitimate reason to expect an upside in the stock. After all, empirical research shows a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and near-term stock price movements.

For the current year, three estimates have moved higher over the last 30 days compared to no negative revision. As a result, the Zacks Consensus Estimate has increased 1.2%.

Moreover, NVDA currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), which means it is in the top 20% of more than 4,000 stocks that we rank based on four factors related to earnings estimates. Given an impressive externally-audited track record, this is a more conclusive indication of the stock's potential upside in the near term. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stocks here >>>> .

Therefore, while the consensus price target may not be a reliable indicator of how much NVDA could gain, the direction of price movement it implies does appear to be a good guide.

The market has some questions about the degree to which Microsoft's AI investments will pay off. Nvidia continues to grow at a rapid pace.