Investing.com -- Nvidia kicked off its much-anticipated GTC developer’s conference on Monday, and it is safe to say that announcements from the first day are already making headlines. Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock closed 0.7% higher on Monday. Here are the key insights from Wall Street analysts regarding the first day of the GTC event.
GTC updates, new AI product announcements
The most important part of the GTC conference’s first day was Nvidia’s unveiling of its latest AI chip and software for powering AI models.
Dubbed Blackwell, this new line of AI graphics processors introduces the GB200 chip, which is expected to be available later this year.
Nvidia aims to attract more orders by offering these enhanced chips to its customers. There is already significant demand for the existing "Hopper" H100 chips and others in the series among companies and software developers.
“Hopper is fantastic, but we need bigger GPUs,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the GTC conference.
The company’s executives said Nvidia is shifting from being a chip supplier to becoming a platform provider, akin to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), allowing other businesses to develop their own software on top of it.
“Blackwell’s not a chip, it’s the name of a platform,” Huang said.
“The sellable commercial product was the GPU and the software was all to help people use the GPU in different ways,” said Nvidia enterprise VP Manuvir Das in an interview. “Of course, we still do that. But what’s really changed is, we really have a commercial software business now.”
The chipmaker also introduced a suite of new software tools designed to simplify the process for developers to market AI models to businesses that utilize Nvidia's technology, which counts among its customers some of the largest tech companies in the world.
Among these tools is a revenue-generating software named NIM, which stands for Nvidia Inference Microservice. It is developed to streamline the utilization of older Nvidia GPUs for inference, the task of executing AI software, enabling firms to continue using hundreds of millions of Nvidia GPUs they already possess.
Analysts discuss GTC, Nvidia stock
Here’s what Wall Street had to say about GTC and Nvidia stock following the first day of the conference:
Stifel: “Efficient scaling of AI systems remains a key differentiator and, to that end, NVDA noted that the B100 is capable of 25x lower total cost of ownership and energy consumption relative to the H100 series. To that end, NVDA also formally announced new InfiniBand and Ethernet switches. In contrast to the H100 launch, the majority of AI innovators were names as expected Blackwell adopters at launch.”
Rosenblatt: “The new Blackwell GPU platform, which ramps up later in 2024, is likely the most ambitious project Silicon Valley has ever witnessed. We believe Blackwell is sold out well into 2025 amid improving Hopper supply.”
Goldman Sachs: “All in, we come away from the keynote with a renewed appreciation of Nvidia’s 1) unique ability to innovate at data center scale (as opposed to at the GPU or chip level), 2) large eco-system and breadth of its customer and partner engagements and, 3) ultimately, compelling position as one of the key enablers and beneficiaries of the ongoing build-out of Generative AI infrastructure.”
JPMorgan: “With leading silicon (GPU/DPU/CPU), hardware/software platforms, and a strong ecosystem, NVIDIA is well positioned to continue to benefit from major secular trends in AI, high-performance computing, gaming, and autonomous vehicles, in our view. Bottom line: NVIDIA continues to be 1-2 steps ahead of its competitors.”
Morgan Stanley: “While there were no big surprises, the performance of the Blackwell family will raise the bar yet again, with aggressive claims on the rack scale product. The company also continues to push forward in services, omniverse, and robotics. We continue to prefer NVDA vs. other AI contenders, & stay OW.”
Keybanc Capital: “NVDA remains uniquely positioned to benefit from AI/ML secular data center growth within the industry. With significant barriers to entry created by its CUDA software stack, we see limited competitive risks and expect NVDA to continue to dominate one of the fastest growing workloads in cloud and enterprise.”
Baird: “Very significant performance step up means Blackwell will likely trigger a strong refresh rate while making it exceedingly more difficult for ASIC architectures to compete. We hear B100 pricing will be close to 40% higher than H100, representing a key top-line catalyst for Nvidia next year.”
Wells Fargo: “We think NVIDIA's presentation did solidly reinforce our long-standing positive thesis in the co's full stack / accelerated compute platform differentiation, which continues to include expanding monetization opportunities.”
Bernstein: “...Blackwell appears likely to be strong, and the company’s continued push not just on chips but on broader software and hardware ecosystems remains unmatched (and in our opinion, hard to stand against). We still like what we see here.”
Cantor Fitzgerald: “...The company continues to innovate and lower the cost of compute to democratize AI to the world and potentially deliver significant value to investors. For those worried about a 2025 air gap, we say don't. Blackwell will likely be a significant growth driver in 2025.”