By Alex Kozul-Wright

Nvidia stock was down early Thursday, despite a positive take from a Wall Street analyst on its coming earnings and a report of huge fund-raising plans from ChatGPT-developer OpenAI.

Nvidia shares fell 0.4% at $187.16 in premarket trading. The stock is up 0.8% since the start of the year through to Wednesday's close.

Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was down 0.5% and Broadcom was falling 0.6% in premarket trading.

The focus is on Nvidia's earnings on Wednesday next week and Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer expects a positive report.

"We see 'typical' $2 billion-$3 billion upside potential to Street sales...led by GB300 Ultra," Schafer wrote in a research note Thursday. "China represents incremental $50 billion TAM [total addressable market] pending H200 license approvals, a 'when' not an 'if' in our view," Schafer added.

Schafer has an Outperform rating on the stock and a price target of $265.

Meanwhile OpenAI is close to completing a new funding round worth over $100 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Barron's early on Thursday.

Large infrastructure investments by OpenAI usually translate into increased demand for AI computing and high-performance graphics-processing units (GPUs). As Nvidia is a critical supplier of GPUs to OpenAI, a bigger fund-raising should drive Nvidia chip sales and revenue growth.

Write to Alex Kozul-Wright at alexander.kozul-wright@barrons.com

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February 19, 2026 06:40 ET (11:40 GMT)

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