Next week, $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ the third-quarter financial report is about to be released. Despite NVIDIA's stock price increasing over 140% year-to-date, making it the undisputed leader of this round of tech stock bull market. For the impending third-quarter report, investment institutions are generally bullish. However, many institutions express doubt about whether its performance can support such a high valuation.

Multiple institutions have raised their target prices.

For NVIDIA's third quarter of fiscal year 2025, ending in late October. The company has disclosed on its official website that it will release the report at local time on November 20, which is early November 21 Beijing time. For the third quarter, NVIDIA's second-quarter financial report released on August 28 expects revenue of 32.5 billion USD, with a fluctuation of 2%, which means it expects between 31.85 billion USD and 33.15 billion USD. The generally accepted accounting principles in the usa gross margin is expected to be between 74.4% and 75%, with a fluctuation of 0.5 percentage points.

Report statistics compiled by journalists from several institutions show that before the third-quarter report is released, several Wall Street analysts have raised their target prices for NVIDIA. Analysts generally believe that the current development of AI applications is still in the early stage, and the company's latest AI chip, Blackwell, will continue to drive NVIDIA's performance upward.

Among them, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore expects that the Blackwell cycle will continue to drive significant increases in the second half. Moore estimates that sales for the latest quarter of Blackwell may reach nearly 5 billion USD to 6 billion USD. In terms of product demand, although demand for H100 is weak, demand for H20 is stronger. This pattern is consistent with previous quarters, when NVIDIA's sales exceeded expectations by about 2 billion USD, and continuous growth is expected. The analyst also predicts that NVIDIA's third-quarter gross margin will improve.

However, Piper Sandler analyst Harsh Kumar stated in a client report: Given NVIDIA's dominant position in the AI accelerator space and the upcoming launch of the Blackwell architecture, NVIDIA is considered a top investment choice. The total market size for AI accelerators in 2025 will continue to rise, and NVIDIA "is in a favorable position" to capture the largest market share. The analyst has raised NVIDIA's target price from 140 USD to 175 USD.

The main reason Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes is bullish on nvidia is that major technology companies continue to invest heavily in the ai field, and nvidia is one of the biggest beneficiaries. Reitzes believes that the capital expenditure plans for ai infrastructure of the five major tech companies in the usa—microsoft, amazon, Meta, Google under alphabet, and oracle—are "very robust," predicting that these companies' datacenter capital expenditures will grow 24% to reach $282 billion by 2025.

Reitzes emphasizes that as nvidia increases the production of its next-generation ai chip Blackwell, this trend is still in its early stages. ai is still developing, and compute-intensive catalysts/use cases (like text-to-video, autonomous agents, self-driving cars, and visual intelligence) are still in the starting phase. nvidia's advantages remain enormous. He raised nvidia's target price from $165 to $185.

HSBC analysts are even more optimistic, directly raising nvidia's target price from $145 to $200, making it one of the most bullish mainstream institutions on nvidia's future market.

Blackwell architecture chip becomes a catalyst.

Recently, nvidia announced the performance of the Blackwell GPU in AI training workloads, which is 2.2 times faster than the previous generation Hopper chip when training large models. This has made many analysts bullish on the prospects of this chip.

This much-anticipated chip has recently begun to be delivered to customers.

This Wednesday, nvidia announced a series of collaborations with japan's telecom giant SoftBank at the nvidia AI summit held in Tokyo, including building ai infrastructure in japan and the largest ai factory, aimed at accelerating japan's sovereign ai plans.

Both sides announced that SoftBank plans to create the "most powerful" AI supercomputer in Japan based on the Nvidia Blackwell architecture B200 GPU, to support a wide range of local services, with construction set to begin in early 2025.

SoftBank Group founder and CEO Masayoshi Son stated that the ai revolution is "the most exciting and dynamic front-line trend for the future": "From neural networks, large language models, agents to siasun robot&automation, they are not tools but a skill that can accomplish tasks... This is why we realize that this industry is actually not a transition of the IT industry."

Masayoshi Son also revealed in the conversation that he had almost become a major shareholder of nvidia three times: "(Ten years ago) the market did not understand the value of nvidia, your future is incredible, but the market did not grasp this. We even discussed merging the two companies. Now, we are going to create incredible value together."

Some institutions have chosen to sell.

Us-listed companies have been intensively releasing their third-quarter reports, while major investment institutions have also successively announced their third-quarter form 13f reports. The trading actions of some large investment institutions have come to light. Overall, reducing positions in leading usa technology stocks is a significant commonality. nvidia has similarly faced reductions by many institutions.

Among them, the position adjustment of Qianlin Asset is very obvious. The total market value of this institution's holdings decreased from 3.79 billion dollars in the previous quarter to 3.15 billion dollars, with a significant reduction in technology stocks. Qianlin completely liquidated 12 stocks including nvidia, tesla, amazon, and microsoft during this quarter.

Bridgewater's total market value of holdings in the third quarter reached 17.7 billion dollars, a decrease from 19.2 billion dollars in the previous quarter, down 8%. Among them, nvidia ranked as Bridgewater's fourth largest stock holding, with holdings of about 4.75 million shares valued at approximately 0.577 billion dollars, accounting for 3.27% of the portfolio. However, in terms of the number of shares held, Bridgewater's holdings decreased by 27.48% compared to the previous quarter.

Although Hillhouse continues to heavily invest in technology stocks, it has reduced its holdings in some previously favored technology leaders such as amazon and nvidia.

In addition to institutions, with the further surge in nvidia's stock price, nvidia executives, including Jensen Huang, have cashed out a total of over 1.8 billion dollars in the stock market. Data shows that nvidia executives and directors have collectively reduced their holdings by nearly 11 million shares this year, marking the largest reduction scale since 2020 after accounting for stock split effects.

Editor/rice