I’ve been at this for some time. Again in 1997, I used to be fortunate sufficient to persuade the companions at a Wall Road boutique funding analysis agency to offer me a shot. It panned out. I grew to become a associate and finally launched my very own sell-side agency in 2003.
The timing was, to say the least, instructive. I acquired to witness the Web bubble increase and bust firsthand. I made and misplaced some huge cash, and had a direct line to working with the most important, most influential mutual and hedge fund managers on the time. I additionally benefited from a mentor who minimize his enamel within the Nineteen Seventies, throughout an identical boom-and-bust interval.
I realized quite a bit, together with the worth of listening to the market, one thing that’s a lot simpler mentioned than accomplished.
Over time, I’ve made my justifiable share of errors. Sticking to my weapons by proudly owning Nvidia hasn’t been one among them. I purchased Nvidia in 2017, lengthy earlier than ChatGPT emerged in 2022, sparking a tidal wave of demand for its graphics processing models, or GPUs.
The rationale for getting all these years in the past was easy: a dynamic CEO dominating gaming with a rising cryptocurrency mining alternative. Over time, my reasoning advanced as AI took maintain, however my conviction remained unwavering. Discover an important firm with an important CEO and keep the course. It’s an excellent mannequin that labored with Apple (Steve Jobs) and Microsoft (Invoice Gates). It has additionally labored very nicely with Nvidia and its dynamic CEO, Jensen Huang.
My value? Lower than $20 per share. I’m not alone in having accomplished a pleasant job shopping for and holding Nvidia. Loads of others additionally took observe and have made cash betting on Nvidia, together with Stephen Guilfoyle, a Wall Road veteran analyst whose profession started on the NYSE flooring in 1987, simply as Black Monday struck.
Guilfoyle isn’t afraid to be unsuitable. And he’s completely nice sticking by winners. He’s a fan of Jensen Huang’s capability to navigate what, traditionally, is a notoriously boom-and-bust business. Guilfoyle lately up to date his Nvidia inventory worth goal after the shares’ unstable experience in 2025. Given his almost forty years of expertise, you may need to take into account what he thinks will occur as we flip the calendar to 2026.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is using a wave of AI demand into 2026.Shutterstock
It wasn’t too way back that enterprises had been laser-focused on inner knowledge facilities walled off from prying eyes. Loads has modified over the previous decade, although. These days, most enterprises have shifted their focus, jettisoning costly siloed knowledge facilities for cloud-managed networks that require much less upfront funding in infrastructure.
The shift from non-public to public didn’t occur in a single day. Nonetheless, it has occurred, and the most important beneficiaries are large firms like Amazon’s AWS, Alphabet, and Microsoft – firms with large underused compute capability that they realized may very well be monetized by ‘renting’ house to different firms.
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These once-niche companies have turn into revenue gravy trains for these firms, notably after ChatGPT broke the Web by turning into the quickest app to ever attain a million customers in 2022. ChatGPT’s success unleashed a surge of synthetic intelligence analysis and growth, resulting in a slate of AI chatbots from deep-pocketed rivals.
Microsoft built-in OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its AI ambitions, contributing to the event of Copilot. Alphabet, afraid OpenAI would undermine its Google search dominance, responded with Gemini. Amazon invested billions to assist the expansion of Anthropic’s Claude LLM. Others additionally joined the race, together with Meta Platforms, Mark Zuckerberg‘s firm, which developed Llama.
It didn’t cease with generative AI, although. Recognizing the potential for AI to rework many operational roles, firms throughout most industries have begun investing in AI purposes, or agentic AI – brokers that may help and generally exchange staff.
The flurry of exercise has meant an insatiable urge for food for Nvidia GPUs.
In 2007, Jensen Huang developedCUDA, a software program that optimizes the efficiency of GPUs. He most likely didn’t understand it totally on the time (maybe he had guessed), however that transfer, coupling high-powered processors with software program, gave it a major benefit in managing the substantial computing calls for related to AI.
It didn’t take lengthy for hyperscalers, the most important cloud knowledge suppliers, to understand prior investments in servers filled with CPUs weren’t as much as the job. Since ChatGPT’s launch, lots of of billions of {dollars} have been poured into retrofitting knowledge facilities with the pc chips most suited to crunch AI workloads – offering Nvidia with a torrent of demand (and money) that accelerated its GPU growth.
First, Nvidia had the H100 and H200, constructed on the Hopper structure. Then, it developed the Blackwell lineup. Quickly, it can launch Vera Rubin, its quickest, most effective AI chip structure but. It’s shifting quick, and lots of of billions in income are up for grabs, with Nvidia by far within the result in proceed capturing it.
Guilfoyle has been a fan of Nvidia since earlier than its blowout 2024 and 2025 rally, when gross sales and earnings first began rocketing larger, because of hyperscalers’ shift from CPUs to GPUs.
As an illustration, I wrote about Guilfoyle’s bullishness on Nvidia in August 2023, when shares had been buying and selling beneath $50 (split-adjusted), and Guilfoyle mentioned costs would rise even larger. On the time, he referred to as Nvidia’s steadiness sheet “beast-like.”
Complete belongings: $161 billion, based on its 10-Q quarterly SEC submitting. Present belongings: $116.5 billion Brief-term money, equivalents, & investments: $60.6 billion.
Present ratio (present belongings/present liabilities): 4.47
Guilfoyle has revisited his worth goal many instances since then, together with lately, when he shared up to date ideas on what might occur to Nvidia in 2026 following its $20 billion take care of Groq.
“Information broke on Christmas Eve that Nvidia had entered right into a non-exclusive licensing settlement with “Groq” for that nine-year-old non-public agency’s inference expertise. Groq, to not be confused with Grok, which is an AI assistant and chatbot developed by Elon Musk‘s xAI, is a designer of high-performance synthetic intelligence accelerator chips,” wrote Guilfoyle in a TheStreet Professional put up. “If accomplished, this is able to be Nvidia’s largest acquisition ever, far surpassing the $7 billion buy of Mellanox in 2019. Is that this a wise buy? Sounds prefer it.”
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“We envision future NVDA platforms the place GPU and LPU co-exist in a rack, related seamlessly with NVDA’s NVLInk networking cloth. Groq’s LPU make use of a big quantity (lots of of MB) of quick on-chip SRAM reminiscence as major storage for AI mannequin weights and dealing knowledge,” wrote Financial institution of America analyst Vivek Arya to purchasers in a analysis observe shared with me. “Longer-term, we expect the potential Groq deal may very well be strategic, much like NVDA’s Apr’20 Mellanox acquisition that’s now the inspiration of NVDA’s networking/AI scaling moat.”
The deal could assist Nvidia expertise work even higher at AI inference, a flowery time period used to explain the usage of AI apps and fashions. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks inference can be a a lot greater market than coaching AI fashions, driving considerably extra demand for infrastructure, together with its chips, software program, and networking gear.
“The quantity of computation obligatory to do this reasoning course of is 100 instances greater than what we used to do,” Huang advised CNBC earlier this 12 months.
Nvidia shares have taken a breather since August, hovering in late October to new all-time highs earlier than retreating via early December. Final week, nevertheless, Nvidia shares began climbing once more, recovering its 50-day shifting common for the primary time since mid-November.
On Dec. 9, Guilfoyle mentioned Nvidia had “survived a short-term sell-off,” prompting him to place a $225 inventory worth goal on its shares. Nvidia’s shares have strengthened since then, main him to replace his considering.
“The shares are engaged in an try and take and maintain the $188 pivot created by the newly shaped bullish double backside sample,” wrote Guilfoyle. “The inventory’s studying for relative energy and its each day Transferring Common Convergence Divergence are each additionally in a greater place right now.”
Guilfoyle’s new Nvidia inventory goal: $235. He plans to purchase extra shares on any retreat to $169 and would not hit the panic button until it closes beneath its 200-day shifting common, which, on the time of his writing, sits at $159.
He isn’t alone in considering Nvidia shares are poised to go larger in 2026. Financial institution of America charges Nvidia a “purchase” with a $275 worth goal. In the meantime, Cantor Fitzgerald ranks Nvidia a prime choose, with a $300 goal worth.
Todd Campbell owns shares in Nvidia.
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