Hailed by Goldman Sachs as the "most important stock on Earth", the semiconductor giant NVIDIA will announce its Q3 2024 financial results this Thursday (after the US market close).
Benefiting from the deep development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, NVIDIA's stock price has soared 194% so far this year, with a market value approaching $3.5 trillion. All investors are watching whether the release of this earnings report will further propel NVIDIA's upward momentum.
Analysts forecast: NVIDIA Q3 revenue growth of 84%
Currently, many Wall Street analysts expect that due to the continued demand for AI infrastructure from global enterprises and government agencies, NVIDIA's total revenue in the third quarter of this year is expected to achieve a year-on-year growth of 84%, reaching $33.28 billion, and net profit will rise to $17.45 billion, far exceeding the $9.24 billion in the same period last year. If this expectation is realized, NVIDIA will also achieve record revenue and net profit for six consecutive quarters.
Due to the optimistic expectations for NVIDIA's earnings, Morgan Stanley also raised NVIDIA's stock price target for December from the previous $150 to $160, and gave it an overweight rating:
We expect NVIDIA's data center business to contribute the majority of revenue growth over the next 5 years, as the market's insatiable demand for generative AI creates a very favorable environment for NVIDIA.
At the same time, Citigroup is also optimistic that by 2025, the data center-related spending of the four largest tech giants in the US will grow another 40%, which means it will provide a strong positive catalyst for NVIDIA, the leader in the AI GPU field, and data center interconnect technology providers.
Bank of America: NVIDIA earnings may determine market direction
In addition, Bank of America Securities analysts pointed out that compared to the next US non-farm payroll data, CPI, and the Fed's decision, NVIDIA's earnings report this week is likely to bring greater volatility to the market:
The market has taken a breather from the post-election rally, and we believe NVIDIA's earnings will determine the near-term market trend.
NVIDIA is scheduled to report earnings this week, and the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index is in line with NVIDIA's own implied volatility, indicating that the risk from NVIDIA's earnings is higher than the upcoming employment and inflation data, or the Fed's meeting decision.
On the other hand, although Bitcoin's correlation with the US stock market has recently decreased, if the US stock market is stimulated to rise, it is highly likely to also help Bitcoin challenge new highs again.
The market is focused on NVIDIA's Blackwell AI GPU
Another noteworthy point is that at the time of this earnings report, the market is also paying close attention to NVIDIA's latest Blackwell architecture-based AI GPU. According to reports, this GPU made its debut in the MLPerf Inference v4.1 test, and exhibited strong performance in executing AI model inference tasks. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has even hailed it as a "complete disruptor in the field of artificial intelligence".
However, there have been previous news leaks that this GPU has serious heat dissipation issues in high-capacity server architectures, although NVIDIA has previously stated that it has optimized the cooling problem, the market is still concerned about whether NVIDIA can mass-produce and achieve large-scale shipments of this GPU as expected next January.
