Nvidia stock rises as CEO Jensen Huang touts ‘insane’ chip demand

by skolnes October 3, 2024

written by skolnes October 3, 2024

Nvidia (NVDA) stock jumped as much as 5% on Thursday as CEO Jensen Huang said demand for its next-generation Blackwell chips has been “insane.”

In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday after the market close, Huang confirmed the chips are in “full production” despite recent design issues that caused some delays in customer rollouts.

“Blackwell is as planned,” Huang said. “Everybody wants to have the most and everybody wants to be first.”

Blackwell delays have caused concern for investors, with many looking to the rollout as the next big catalyst for the chipmaker after a recent stock slump fueled by a mid-July sell-off from the unwinding of the yen carry trade.

Since then, markets have seen a rotation out of Big Tech while other macroeconomic factors, such as China trade fears, have also hampered Nvidia’s stock price.

But investors and analysts alike remain largely confident in the trajectory of the artificial intelligence trade. Nvidia’s stock is still up about 170% over the last 12 months and more than 2,700% over the last five years. Year to date, Nvidia has gained around 150%.

90% of Wall Street analysts recommend the stock as a Buy, with the majority predicting that shares will rise to around $147.60 over the next year, according to Bloomberg consensus estimates.

On top of its latest Blackwell update, Nvidia’s move to the upside also comes as the company backed ChatGPT developer OpenAI (MSFT) in its latest funding round, which concluded on Wednesday.

OpenAI was able to raise an additional $6.6 billion to reach a valuation of $157 billion in another bullish sign for the AI boom.

Gil Luria, senior software analyst at DA Davidson, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance that “there’s a direct flow from the funding round that was announced today to Nvidia” due to data center demand that would benefit the chipmaker. “That’s why the stock’s up today,” he said.