By Adam Clark
Nvidia was gaining early on Thursday, once again testing the upper end of its recent trading range with some optimism ahead of its earnings report later this month.
Nvidia shares were up 1.1% at $192.11 in premarket trading. The stock has risen 11% in the past five trading sessions but has remained broadly range-bound since November.
Investors will be watching to see whether the company's earnings report, due Feb. 25, can help prompt another rally. Nvidia is expected to report adjusted earnings of $1.49 a share on revenue of $65.58 billion for its January quarter, according to a FactSet poll of analysts' estimates.
However, the focus will be more on the company's guidance. UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri wrote this week that investor expectations for Nvidia's April quarter likely demand revenue somewhere in the $74 billion-$75 billion range, ahead of the consensus forecasts of $71.59 billion among analysts tracked by FactSet.
"In addition to the more obvious investor debates around artificial intelligence spend sustainability/ROI [return on investment]...we would like to hear Nvidia address recent concerns we have heard around its CUDA moat with the risk of new models like Anthropic Claude Code," Arcuri wrote.
Arcuri has a Buy rating and $245 target price on Nvidia stock.
Another major question that continues to hover over Nvidia is the range of AI chip start-ups aiming to take a chunk of its market. The latest to raise significant funds is British company Olix. It has raised $220 million for the development of photonic AI processors that it hopes will eventually rival Nvidia's graphics-processing units, the Financial Times reported.
"We are building a new class of accelerator designed to achieve high throughput and high interactivity on the most demanding inference workloads, free from the architectural and supply chain constraints of the current regime," Olix said in a Wednesday statement.
Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was up 1.0% and Broadcom was0.5% higher.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
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February 12, 2026 08:46 ET (13:46 GMT)
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