Nvidia has been one of the most hyped and closely followed stocks in recent memory as the fortunes of the broader market increasingly hinge on the AI chip leader.
At one point this year, the stock accounted for more than a third of the S&P 500's gains, and some investors even held watch parties for Nvidia's earnings release.
Nvidia's astronomical run to a $3 trillion company has also been somewhat divisive as many on Wall Street have doubted that the stock can sustain further gains while others see the AI boom fueling more upside.
That's left investors asking, "Should I buy Nvidia stock right now, or sell it?"
Analysts at Bank of America have an answer: In a note on Thursday, they reiterated their buy rating on Nvidia stock and raised their price target to $190 from $165, implying it could soar 38% higher from Friday's closing price.
At $190 a share, Nvidia's market cap would also explode to $4.7 trillion, from $3.4 trillion today.
In fact, BofA is so bullish on Nvidia stock that analysts called it a "generational opportunity," estimating a total addressable market of more than $400 billion for AI accelerators.
"AI models (demand) continue to evolve, with the cadence of new LLM model launches now increased to 3-5 times/yr per developer (OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc.), and each new major generation requiring 10-20x compute requirement to train," analysts said.
Their confidence in Nvidia has been boosted by others in the chip sector like Taiwan Semiconductor and ASML, which both recently signaled strong AI demand. BofA's meetings with executives at Broadcom and Micron as well as comments from AMD have yielded similar indications.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also touted huge demand for the company's next-generation AI chip.
“Blackwell is in full production. Blackwell is as planned, and the demand for Blackwell is insane,” he told CNBC earlier this month. “Everybody wants to have the most, and everybody wants to be first.”
Adding to BofA's bullish case for Nvidia is its underappreciated enterprise partnerships with the likes of Accenture, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and others as well as its software products that help reinforce Nvidia's dominance in hardware. They combine to create a deeper overall Nvidia ecosystem for AI.
Plus, Nvidia could generate more than $200 billion in free cash flow over the next two years, rivaling even Apple, BofA estimated.
Earnings reports later this month from tech giants that are developing AI technologies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, should provide more insight into demand. And Nvidia is due to report Nov. 20.
While some on Wall Street have expressed skepticism on whether massive investments in AI are translating to the bottom line, the tech sector is locked in a cutthroat race to be first on the scene with the latest advances in AI.
"We continue to see the pace of new model development increase," BofA said. "LLMs in particular are being developed for both larger size and better reasoning capabilities, which both require greater training intensity."
