Intelligent Finance learned that after chip manufacturer Nvidia (NVDA.US) became the world's most valuable company on Tuesday riding the AI heat wave, Asian semiconductor and related stocks also rose on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Nvidia's stock price rose by 3.6%, reaching a market value of $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft (MSFT.US), the current market value of $3.32 trillion, becoming the number one market value company in the US stock market. Earlier this month, Nvidia's market value broke through $3 trillion for the first time, overtaking Apple (AAPL.US) to become the second largest market value in the US stock market. Nvidia's share price has risen by nearly 174% this year.

During the Asian trading session on Wednesday, due to investors' optimistic sentiment towards Nvidia spreading to Asian technology stocks, the highest increase among chip foundry manufacturers TSMC (TSM.US) reached 4.34%. TSMC produces Nvidia's high-performance GPU, which is an essential hardware chip for AI technology, helping to drive large language models, and can identify and generate text machine learning programs.

Hon Hai Precision (Foxconn) rose as much as 4.78%. The company has established a strategic partnership with Nvidia and plans to establish an "AI factory" that will use Nvidia chips in a range of facilities, electric vehicles, and large prophecy modeling technologies.

According to data, Japanese technology stocks also rose, including leading semiconductor test equipment supplier Advantest, which is Nvidia's customer. Although the report stated that Nvidia's share of the total sales of Advantest was less than 1%, its share rose by as much as 3.86% on Wednesday. The Japanese investment holding company SoftBank Group, which owns chip design company Arm (ARM.US), rose as much as 4.19%. Nvidia's chips use Arm's architecture.

Nvidia's value chain has also extended to South Korea, and storage chip manufacturer SK Hynix and conglomerate Samsung Electronics' stock prices have also risen. Samsung Electronics' stock price rose as much as 3.38%, and SK Hynix's stock price rose as much as 7.04%.

SK Hynix provides Nvidia with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips for AI chipsets. According to reports, before March, the company was the only known Nvidia HBM chip supplier. The company is also reportedly looking at Samsung and Micron's production of HBM chips. Earlier, Samsung refuted a report that its chips failed Nvidia's tests due to heat and power problems. When asked about the report, Huang Renxun, Nvidia's CEO, was also quoted as saying "there is no such thing."

"The most important stock in the world" may have far from finished rising.

Although Nvidia's share price has been soaring since last year, reaching new highs time and time again, voices in the top Wall Street investment banks are still bullish on Nvidia.

Bank of America pointed out that although Nvidia's share price has repeatedly reached a record high in the recent period, there is still huge potential for upward movement, because the chip company is expected to continue to dominate the AI chip market in the next few years. In a report released on June 5th, the bank reiterated its "buy" rating for Nvidia's stock and said the company, led by Huang Renxun, is still the top choice in the IT industry. The bank's strategist set a target price of as high as $150 for Nvidia within 12 months (Nvidia's stock price closed at $130.98 on Monday).

Susquehanna also raised Nvidia's target stock price from $145 to $160 in a recent report. The institution stated in the report: "Although our valuation is far higher than the average level of peers of about 28.5 times, we believe this is reasonable because Nvidia can seize significant opportunities in the booming AI terminal market."

Secondly, Rosenblatt, a well-known Wall Street institution, raised Nvidia's target stock price from $140 to $200, maintaining a "buy" rating. This $200 price is the highest 12-month target stock price on Wall Street. In addition, Barclays Bank raised Nvidia's target stock price from $120 to $145, and Argus Research raised Nvidia's target stock price from $110 to $150.

Nvidia's moat is strong.

Beth Kindig, a technology industry analyst from the well-known investment firm I/O Fund, recently released a research report predicting that Nvidia's stock price will soar by about 258% from current levels by 2030, and its market cap is expected to reach $10 trillion by then (Nvidia's current market cap is about $297 billion). The main logic is that Nvidia's "CUDA+AI GPU" ecosystem brings an incredibly powerful moat, and its next-generation AI GPU based on the Blackwell architecture is expected to bring huge revenue contributions.

Nvidia has been deeply rooted in the global high-performance computing field for many years, especially its CUDA computing platform, which is recommended by software and hardware for high-performance computing applications such as AI training/inference. The CUDA computing platform is an exclusive parallel computing acceleration platform and programming assistant software developed by Nvidia, which allows software developers and software engineers to use Nvidia GPUs to accelerate parallel general-purpose computing (only supports Nvidia GPUs and cannot be compatible with mainstream GPUs such as AMD and Intel).

CUDA can be said to be the platform on which generation-based AI applications such as ChatGPT depend heavily. Its importance is on the same level as the hardware system and is crucial for the development and deployment of large-scale AI models. With extremely high technical maturity, absolute performance optimization advantages, and extensive ecosystem support, CUDA has become the most commonly used and widely popularized collaborative platform in AI research and commercial deployment.

Nvidia's currently hottest AI chip, the H100/H200 GPU accelerator, is based on Nvidia's breakthrough Hopper GPU architecture, providing significantly more powerful computational power than its predecessor, especially in floating-point operations, tensor core performance, and AI-specific acceleration. Even more significant is that the AI GPU based on the Blackwell architecture has far higher performance than the Hopper architecture. In particular, the GB200 inference performance of the Blackwell architecture on the GPT-3 LLM benchmark with 175 billion parameters is 7 times that of the H100 system, and provides four times the training speed of the H100 system.

Regarding when the new Blackwell architecture AI GPU will be put into various data centers, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the brand-new Blackwell architecture AI GPU product will be shipped in the second quarter of this year, increased in the third quarter, and officially put into data centers in the fourth quarter. It is expected that the 'Blackwell architecture chip revenue will grow significantly' this year. In the Blackwell architecture AI GPU press release issued by Nvidia in March, Tesla CEO Musk publicly stated that Nvidia's AI hardware was the 'best AI hardware'.

Analyst Jin Di predicts that by the end of Nvidia's fiscal year 2026, revenue from the Blackwell architecture AI GPU will significantly exceed that of its predecessor H100 architecture, with Blackwell architecture expected to drive Nvidia's datacenter revenue to as high as $200 billion.