NVIDIA Stock Price and Forecast: NVDA advances 9.8% on new CPU

Nvidia stock (NVDA) ended two down sessions in a row with a massive uptick on Thursday. The market's favorite semiconductor stock closed up 9.8% at $281.50, just shy of FXStreet's bull target. A flurry of optimistic and interesting announcements at Nvidia's annual spring GPU Technology Conference underpinned the sentiment around its stock price.

Also read: AMC stock sees further weakness in premarket

Nvidia announced that it is building its first standalone CPU, which is an unexpected direction for the company known for GPUs. This comes just two days after announcing a new calculation of its total addressable market (TAM), which it now says hits $1 trillion.

Nvidia Stock News: A CPU to rule them all

Nvidia's new CPU is a sort of super chip. It has 144 cores fitted inside essentially two CPUs that CEO Jensen Huang said gives it twice the memory bandwidth and twice the energy efficiency of other competing server chips. The CPU is meant for AI research, but Huang said Nvidia has new offerings coming out for a host of different growth segments.

"The entire data center, whether it's for scientific computing, or for artificial intelligence training, or inference to the app, the deployment of AI, or data centers at the edge, all the way out to an autonomous system, like a self-driving car, we have data center-scale products and technologies for all of them," Huang said.

The CPU product is called Grace and is named after Grace Hopper – the woman who invented the theory of machine-independent programming languages. An early programming language she authored was later essential for devising COBOL, a common high-level language still in use on mainframe computers.

At an investor day presentation earlier this week, Nvidia executives explained how their larger strategy now enables a $1 trillion TAM. The larger market for Nvidia products than earlier estimates stems from Nvidia's new focus on software platform offerings. The  $1 trillion breaks down like so: $150 billion from omniverse enterprise software, $150 billion from artificial intelligence software, $100 billion from gaming, $300 billion from the existing semiconductor chip business, $300 billion from the automotive segment, with this last offering greatly expanded through software offerings.

Evercore ISI and Bernstein both have recently given outperform ratings for Nvidia stock. Evercore has a $375 price target on NVDA shares, a solid 44% upside, while Bernstein has a price target of $350.

Huang said he was quite willing to work with Intel to produce Nvidia chips onshore in the US after Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to brief the US Senate's Commerce Committee on his company's plans to utilize funding from the $52 billion CHIPS Act to reshore and expand US semiconductor fabrication. Nvidia's interest in working with Intel rather than its current primary foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), helped INTC shares gain nearly 7% on Thursday as well.

Nvidia Stock Forecast: $284.22 in close proximity

NVDA broke through December 6's low of $280.38 to close up at $281.50 on Thursday. This is not too far removed from FXStreet's bull target.

From Thursday: "To keep the rally going, bulls will try to make a play for $284.22. This level acted as resistance in early to mid-January." With the premarket making NVDA's way up to $282, $284.22 remains the obvious point of contention. NVDA price may touch here before pulling back. Support is now at $259 where NVDA price has created a ledge.

The next high of importance is at $313.30, the high from December 28, but FXStreet finds it more likely that NVDA will drop to support before making any thrust to that level. Besides $259, this past week's resistance around $272 could turn into support.

NVDA 1-day chart