Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) beat Wall Street targets for the 14th straight quarter, yet watched its stock fall anyway.
Despite a roughly $5.4 trillion valuation, a Wall Street Journal columnist argued this week that the world’s most valuable company remains underappreciated by investors.
Heard on the Street’s Dan Gallagher made the case that Nvidia trades at a relative bargain multiple given how fast it is still growing.
Yet the stock has lagged this year as its massive $5.4 trillion valuation makes outsized returns harder to achieve, leading UBS analyst Tim Arcuri to describe the mood among investors as ‘marked apathy’ with money rotating toward what Morgan Stanley’s Joe Moore called secondary and tertiary AI beneficiaries.
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has more than tripled this year on that rotation.
The irony, per the column, is that Nvidia is now attacking Intel’s home turf with decoupled CPU chips and has “visibility” to nearly $20 billion in CPU revenue this fiscal year. That figure sits just below the $22 billion Intel’s entire data-center business is expected to generate.
Why Prediction Markets Are Hedging Their Nvidia Bets
The apathy Arcuri flagged is quantifiable.
A Polymarket market on the world’s largest company by year-end prices Nvidia at just 66% to still hold the crown on Dec. 31, with more than $1.2 million in volume behind it.
That leaves over a 33% chance the title slips away.
Traders give Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) a 19% shot, and the gap between the two megacaps currently sits at just over $700 billion. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) trails at 8%.
The bull case rests on growth unheard of at Nvidia’s size.
The company guided to about $91 billion in revenue for the quarter ending in July, nearly double a year earlier, at a time when public companies generating at least $50 billion in quarterly revenue grow 14% on average, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data cited in the column.
A separate Polymarket contract, “AI bubble burst by…?”, puts the odds of an AI industry downturn by year-end at 21%.
The bar is high, resolving only if at least three severe events hit within 90 days, one of them Nvidia’s stock falling 50% from its high. That a fifth of traders will pay for that scenario at all suggests the apathy runs deeper than valuation.
If the bears are right that the AI trade is tiring, the spending hasn’t gotten the memo.
SpaceX’s IPO filing touted data centers running Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell systems, and the company poured $12.4 billion into capital expenditures last year for xAI, triple what it spent on its actual space business.
Nvidia is trading today at $217, down over 5% this week.
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