Bull tech compares Nvidia to LeBron James in high school as AI boom accelerates

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has a reputation for colorful quotes on tech stocks, and AI chip giant Nvidia has often been the target of his rhetorical arsenal.

On Thursday, he continued to make the case for Nvidia, comparing it to one of the greatest basketball players of all time.

“If you look at Nvidia here, this is LeBron in high school in terms of where this story will ultimately go,” Ives told Bloomberg TV.

Later in the interview, he returned to the comparison and said that the reason Nvidia is like a young LeBron James is because it is way ahead of any other competitor and is “the only game in town.”

The comments came as investors sent Nvidia shares lower despite an earnings report that blew away forecasts late Wednesday.

But while Wall Street’s concerns focused on delays to future Blackwell chips, Ives said CEO Jensen Huang quelled those worries with revenue guidance that was still robust, even if it fell short of the more aggressive analyst views.

“They came. They delivered,” he added of Nvidia’s earnings. “And I think for technology, that’s going to put fuel in that rally.”

Based on his channel checks in Asia, Ives estimated that Blackwell’s revenue could be in the tens of billions of dollars, attributing to the company’s looser guidelines that Huang was not reluctant to reveal his playbook.

He also argued for a multiplier effect that Nvidia has in the wider technology landscape, saying that every dollar spent on its chips spreads across the sector by a factor of 8-10 times.

So Ives sees $1 trillion in capital spending on AI over the next three years — double his forecast six months ago.

Demand for Nvidia chips is accelerating and expanding beyond so-called hyperscaler customers such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon and Google, and other businesses are growing as more AI use cases emerge, he added.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the AI ​​revolution,” he predicted. – They start dating.

Ives wasn’t the only Wall Street analyst to look past the stock market’s initial reaction to Nvidia’s earnings report. Most still put stocks in the “buy” category.

Bank of America Global Research reiterated a buy rating and raised its price target on the stock from $150 to $165, saying Nvidia remains the “key beneficiary of the genAI cycle” and imploring investors to “ignore the quarterly noise.”

Nvidia shares closed Friday at $119.37, representing a weekly loss of about 8%.

“We think the AI ​​rally has more to go despite the apparent investor disappointment with Nvidia’s rapid profit growth,” Thomas Matthews, head of Asia Pacific markets at Capital Economics, said in a note.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com