What Wall Street’s saying about Nvidia’s Q1 results
A makeover beautifies the growth outlook; so does the CPU opportunity.
Shares of Nvidia are lower for the fourth straight time after releasing quarterly results (despite another tidy top- and bottom-line beat). The good news for bulls is that the day-after reaction hasn’t been a good guide to what the stock does after that.
“We ignore this noise,” wrote Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya, who raised his price target on the stock to $350 from $320, and most of his peers agreed.
Zooming out, Wall Street analysts liked what they saw and heard from CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress on Wednesday, with many boosting their view on how the shares will climb.
Here’s what they highlighted:
Corporate makeover
One of the most interesting things to come out of Nvidia’s quarterly results wasn’t just the numbers, but the new way in which they’re being arranged.
In particular, Nvidia is subdividing its “data center” revenues between hyperscale customers and everything else (formally, AI Clouds, Industrial, and Enterprise, or ACIE) in a bid to highlight its competitive advantage in the latter.
Revenues from each of these segments were roughly equal in Q1, though hyperscale sales are growing far faster than ACIE (74% versus 11%).
Megacap tech companies might have specific demands for the components going into their data centers (and in the case of many, custom chips), but Nvidia believes where its offerings really stand out is for the other cohort of clients who just want AI compute to be delivered to them (a full-stack solution, or off-the-rack racks, if you prefer).
“There’s a whole category of data centers that semi-custom chips just don’t apply because these data centers want to buy systems, they want to operate systems — they don’t want to design, they don’t want to build it themselves,” Huang said on the conference call. “We’re fairly unique in our ability to be able to serve this industry.”
These customers are all individually way smaller than the hyperscalers, but all these little wins would add up big over time, he argued.
“Jensen mentioned he expects ACIE to grow faster in the longer-term given that there are more potential customers in the segment and these customers do not want to design their own compute but rather have an off the shelf solution (where NVDA’s share is very high),” wrote Needham & Co. analyst Quinn Bolton, who hiked his price target to $270 from $240.
“NVDA has a near-monopoly here via AI factories and full-platform support — areas which custom ASICs cannot address,” BofA’s Arya added.
However, this shift toward data center growth dominated by non-hyperscale opportunities seems more like the beginning of a story that’ll be written in 2028 than beyond, mainly because...
$1 trillion and counting
When asked about incremental top-line drivers beyond the $1 trillion revenue target for Blackwell and Vera Rubin sales through the end of next year, Huang pointed to three things:
More sales to frontier AI models (namely, Anthropic)
Stand-alone Vera CPU sales
LPX (an AI inference accelerator developed with Groq)
Conspicuous by omission here is any reference to that non-hyperscale ACIE category.
Analysts primarily keyed in on door No. 2 here, with Huang saying that he expects to deliver $20 billion in “stand-alone” Vera CPU revenues this year.
“The company seems set to potentially become the CPU king with a possible business as big or even bigger than their more traditional competitors in an overall new (incremental) TAM they size at $200 billion,” wrote Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon, who lifted his price target to $315 from $300.
Semi stocks with a high CPU footprint like Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, and Arm Holdings have outperformed in 2026 as the “orchestration” demands of AI agents boost the prominence of these older-school offerings in running models.
“We are excited for this opportunity and think that NVIDIA’s strong procurement will put them in a very strong position in a supply constrained environment,” said Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore, who nudged up his price target to $288 from $285.
