Nvidia faces $US78.8b earnings test as BofA lifts target on AI chip demand

Nvidia heads into its quarterly earnings on 20 May with Wall Street analysts raising price targets and consensus revenue estimates climbing toward $US78.8 billion ($A118.7 billion) as global demand for the company’s next-generation Blackwell B300 AI chips accelerates.

Bank of America semiconductor analyst Vivek Arya lifted his price target on the stock to $US320 from $US300 in a 13 May research note, citing a revised forecast that puts the total addressable market for AI data centres at $US1.7 trillion by 2030 — up from a prior $US1.4 trillion estimate and implying a compound annual growth rate of 45 per cent. The new target suggests roughly 45 per cent upside from Nvidia’s share price near $US220. “2026 will continue to be a year of accelerating AI sales and ROIs,” Arya wrote.

Nvidia’s market capitalisation touched $US5.5 trillion on 13 May, the first time any company in history has crossed that threshold, according to TheStreet. The stock extended gains the following day to roughly $US5.7 trillion — a valuation larger than the entire Australian Securities Exchange.

Citi analyst Atif Malik separately projected Nvidia would report first-quarter revenue of $US80 billion, topping the $US78.8 billion consensus, in a preview published 12 May. “Stronger-than-expected demand for Blackwell B300 chips” is the primary driver of the anticipated beat, Malik wrote, according to investingLive. Malik maintains a Buy rating with a $US300 price target and estimates full-year revenue of $US284 billion — a 79 per cent year-on-year jump.

The Blackwell B300 architecture, which Nvidia began shipping in volume earlier this year, represents the company’s most significant generational leap in AI training and inference performance. Hyperscale cloud providers — including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud — have committed tens of billions of dollars to Blackwell-powered infrastructure, making Nvidia’s quarterly disclosures a closely watched proxy for overall AI capital expenditure.

The earnings report lands at a diplomatically sensitive moment. Chief executive Jensen Huang is accompanying US President Donald Trump to a summit in Beijing centred on semiconductor export controls, The Motley Fool reported. China has historically been one of Nvidia’s largest markets for data-centre GPUs, and any tightening of restrictions could reshape the company’s geographic revenue mix even as US hyperscaler demand remains robust.

The AI infrastructure buildout shows little sign of decelerating. Nvidia shares have rallied more than 30 per cent in 2026, outpacing the broader semiconductor index, Business Insider reported. Cloud providers and enterprises continue stocking Blackwell systems for both training large language models and running inference at scale.

For Australian investors with exposure to US technology stocks — either directly or through superannuation funds with significant Nasdaq weightings — the 20 May earnings call represents a bellwether for whether AI infrastructure spending can sustain the valuations the market has already priced in. Several major Australian super funds, including AustralianSuper and Hostplus, hold Nvidia among their top international equity positions.