AI Summit! NVIDIA GTC Conference: Great Expectations, Can B100 Handle the Scene?

The annual GTC conference by NVIDIA is not just a summit on GPU technology, but has become a top event for AI developers worldwide.

From March 18th to 21st, NVIDIA's 2024 AI conference GTC will be held at the San Jose Convention Center in the United States. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a speech titled "The #1 AI Conference for Developers."

Huang usually introduces new products at the beginning of the event and shares his latest insights on future technology trends.

The focus of this conference includes three key points: the next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture, the new B100 GPU based on Blackwell, and humanoid robots. Media analysis suggests that after a five-year hiatus from offline events, Huang is expected to "bring out some real heavyweights."

Wall Street predicts that this GTC will help NVIDIA's stock end its recent volatile trend and continue its strong growth momentum of over 80% so far this year.

Described as the Apple annual product launch of the AI world, Ted Mortonson, a technical strategist at Robert W. Baird, stated:

"This is a huge stimulus because they are likely to provide more information on industry penetration and other aspects."

After the huge success of the H100, NVIDIA's stock price has been steadily rising, increasing its market value by $1 trillion this year, making it the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 index.

However, since reaching a record closing price on March 7th, NVIDIA's stock price has started to fluctuate: the stock price ended the worst two-day decline in nearly five months on Tuesday, but started to fall again on Wednesday. In early trading on Thursday, the stock price fell by over 1%.

This volatility is partly due to traders' pricing operations before the event. Options data shows that as the conference approaches, investors are paying increasingly high premiums to buy call options, especially short-term contracts.

Mortonson said:

"This is a bit like Apple's product launch event, everyone wants to be ahead."

He also raised a million-dollar question:

"Will there be a 'buy the rumor, sell the fact' phenomenon after Huang's keynote speech?"

Due to the significant impact of GTC on stock prices, Bank of America even refers to it as the "Woodstock music festival of the AI world." Woodstock music festival is one of the most famous rock music festivals in the world.Before the conference, Bank of America raised NVIDIA's target price from $925 to $1100, 25.1% higher than Thursday's closing price of $879.4.

Despite the stock price nearly quadrupling in the past 12 months, according to Bank of America's analysis, NVIDIA's valuation still has room for further growth. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, its price-earnings ratio has actually been decreasing.

At the same time, Wall Street is extremely optimistic about NVIDIA's current GTC. Among analysts tracked by Bloomberg, NVIDIA has received 60 buy ratings, 7 hold ratings, and 0 sell ratings.

TD Cowen analyst Matthew Ramsay stated:

Given our confidence in current demand levels and all the upside we forecast over the next 12 to 18 months, I feel very comfortable and confident.

He rates NVIDIA as "outperforming the market" with a target price of $900.

Although expectations were positive leading up to the GTC, analysts and investors are cautious as NVIDIA's stock trading approaches technically overbought levels, which could trigger a pullback.