Evercore ISI is bullish Nvidia , the best-performing S & P 500 stock this year, as the latest earnings season approaches. The firm called the chipmaker a top play and maintained its outperform rating and $600 price target. That forecast suggests 36.2% upside for the semiconductor company. “NVIDIA remains our top pick overall, positioned well into earnings season based on sustainability of AI spend and beat/raise on the come,” analyst Matthew Prisco said in a Thursday note. “The name also offers a surprisingly attractive valuation.” The corporate earnings season kicks off next week, with big banks JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup slated to report. Nvidia is slated to post its results in November. Prisco pointed to Nvidia saying the firm still prefers exposure to artificial intelligence-levered names from the semiconductor industry. Nvidia is known as an AI powerhouse given its highly desirable chips for artificial intelligence. Shares have been on a tear this year, rallying more than 200%. NVDA YTD mountain NVDA in 2023 According to the Evercore ISI analyst, Nvidia’s demand is sustainable through the first half of 2024, with networking and HBM, or high-bandwidth memory, demand inflections to come. He highlighted Nvidia as one of the few semiconductor leaders that screen attractively in earnings power for 2025. “Yes, there should eventually be some type of cloud digestion given [the] magnitude of spending today, but we believe underlying demand trends will result in this event being better-than-feared,” he said. “Simply put, it is too early to get off the AI train—NVDA remains our favorite play here.” — CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
