Every analyst who covers Nvidia, the semiconductor company that has beat Wall Street’s projections for eight consecutive quarters, has a positive or neutral outlook on the stock. That is, every analyst except Jay Goldberg of Seaport Research Partners.
“Nvidia’s had a great run, and nothing lasts forever,” say Goldberg, who has a sell rating on the $3.3 trillion market cap stock, as Wall Street prepares for the chipmaker’s highly anticipated quarterly earnings report on Wednesday.
Goldberg, who covers semiconductors for the equity research firm, believes that Nvidia’s growth is plateauing. “This is a heavily scrutinized stock. We know what the upside is; there’s not much of it left,” he told Fortune after publishing a note to investors Wednesday that re-iterated his “Sell” rating. “In contrast, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong to drive downside—there’s all the snafus and supply chain.”
Goldberg, believes that TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer, has maximized its capacity to produce Nvidia chips, and that this fact is already priced into Nvidia stock. He also believes that volatile trade policy and tensions with international trade partners pose extreme headwinds for Nvidia. This is why he’s put a $100 price target on Nvidia, which was trading around $136 per share ahead of its fiscal Q1 earnings report on Wednesday
Nvidia, whose pricey chips help power the popular AI large language models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, xAI and more, has become a key company impacted by President Trump’s evolving trade policies. In April, the California-based company warned that it would report a $5.5 billion writedown to inventory after President Trump said that the company would need a license to export its H20 chip to China and some other countries. The financial reality of this threat will become clear during Wednesday’s earnings report.
Still, analysts, except Goldberg, have positive expectations for the chipmaker as they anticipate net income to increase by 31% to $19 billion, with revenue growing 66% year-over-year to $43 billion, per Bloomberg.
Goldberg is fine being the black sheep. “US government chip policies are, at best, chaotic, and at worst, extremely disruptive and counterproductive and destructive to American industry,” he says. “The past Administration’s policies weren’t great, but this current trajectory we’re on of everything changing every week is also extremely destructive.”
Rather than Nvidia, Goldberg’s top semiconductor stock pick is Broadcom. He believes that Broadcom will play an integral role in helping hyperscalerslike Google, Amazon and Microsoft design and manufacture proprietary alternatives to Nvidia chips. “In a very high level context, the AI chip market is very much a contest between Nvidia and Broadcom. I think the Broadcom side of it is not fully priced-in or well-understood by the Street.”
