MW Can Nvidia's stock approach $400? Here's why earnings may mark the start of a big rally.

By Britney Nguyen

Nvidia shares have gone nowhere this year, but a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst sees next Wednesday's earnings report as the first of a few notable catalysts

Nvidia, led by CEO Jensen Huang, will report fourth-quarter earnings results on Feb. 25.

An analyst is urging Nvidia investors to "stay calm" ahead of some events that could reignite the stock, which has been starved for momentum this year.

Nvidia (NVDA) is just at the start "of a rack-scale super cycle," Cantor Fitzgerald analyst C.J. Muse wrote in a note to clients, referring to the ongoing ramp of its Blackwell artificial-intelligence chips and associated rack systems, as well as the upcoming Rubin family that is expected in the latter half of this year.

But well before that, Nvidia is due to report quarterly earnings next Wednesday, and Muse expects to hear then that Rubin is on track for its ramp.

In his view, Nvidia is going into its fourth-quarter earnings report with an "extremely positive" setup, especially as its shares are trading at 21x expected earnings for 2026 and 16x expectations for 2027.

And demand for compute power "remains insatiable," Muse said in a Tuesday note. He doesn't see supply constraints letting up anytime soon and noted that even Nvidia's six-year-old A100 chips are sold out as prices rise for its offerings.

"Bigger picture, we are still in the very beginning of the next industrial revolution," as agentic and physical AI are deployed and adopted, Muse said.

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Still, investors continue to be worried about Nvidia's place in the AI trade, Muse said.

For one, the stock "barely budged" in response to massive capital-expenditures raises at Amazon.com (AMZN) and Microsoft $(MSFT)$ earlier this month, he noted, and investors have been fearful that the spending is unsustainable.

Meanwhile, the broader market has been plagued by concerns over the trillion-dollar web of deals between Nvidia and a handful of other AI players to build out data centers for OpenAI. And the chip maker is seeing growing competition from custom chip projects, such as Google's tensor processing units that it uses to train and run its Gemini AI models.

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To Muse, however, "this 'zero-sum' view is flawed."

Demand for AI "is exploding," he said, adding that Nvidia has likely sold out of its chips for 2026. Muse thinks the company is now building its backlog for 2027 and 2028.

Therefore, he sees the upcoming earnings report as "the beginning of an inflection point for shares." Nvidia's stock is down about 3.2% so far this year.

Following the report, Muse expects Nvidia's leadership in the chip market to get a boost when the first frontier AI models trained on its Blackwell chips hit the market next month. The company's annual GPU Technology Conference also takes place in March, and Muse said he expects the event to further highlight the company's dominance in the AI race.

Finally, Muse said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is likely to update the company's guidance for data-center revenue in 2027 ahead of the Computex trade show in June.

On those points, Muse said Nvidia's stock is on track to at least reach $300, "though given growth prospects through the end of the decade," he sees an argument for it getting closer to $400. His new price target represents almost 119% in upside from the stock's last closing price of $182.81.

-Britney Nguyen

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February 17, 2026 11:57 ET (16:57 GMT)

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