Nvidia reports August 26. The stock has had a rough few weeks. Bond yields spiked, the broader market sold off, and AI infrastructure names got hit harder than most.
Michael Burry flagged a startup. The circular financing debate keeps resurfacing. There is no shortage of reasons to be cautious heading into next week.
Oppenheimer is not cautious. The firm just reiterated its bullish case with numbers specific enough to be worth examining before the report lands.
Oppenheimer Outperform rating on Nvidia NVDA stock
Oppenheimer maintained its Outperform rating and $265 price target on Nvidia on August 20, according to Investing.com.
The stock trades at a P/E of 33.64 with a PEG ratio of 0.3. Nvidia has delivered 71% revenue growth over the past 12 months. Market cap sits at $5.31 trillion. Gross profit margin is 74%.
Oppenheimer expects Nvidia to beat second-quarter estimates and deliver a stronger-than-expected third-quarter outlook. The firm projects more than $1 trillion in cumulative revenues from Nvidia’s GB200, GB300 and VR200 platforms between 2025 and 2027.
That is a platform-level projection for specific products. It reflects the scale of what hyperscalers and AI developers are committing to spend on infrastructure.
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Nvidia guided to $91 billion in Q2 revenue, plus or minus 2%, with gross margin targets of approximately 75%. Wall Street’s average estimate sits slightly above that at $91.9 billion. The guidance excludes any data center compute revenue from China.
The firm also noted Nvidia’s commitment to SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio. Nvidia will be the exclusive AI compute infrastructure provider at the campus, with initial capacity of 4.25 gigawatts and an option to expand to 8 gigawatts. OpenAI will lease the campus for 20 years. Nvidia is investing $1.5 billion directly in SB Energy and has provided residual value guarantees capped at $105 billion. Capacity comes online in phases beginning in 2028, CNBC reported.
Blackwell Ultra and Vera Rubin ramp for NVDA investors
Oppenheimer’s near-term case rests on Blackwell Ultra. The next-generation VR200 system is expected to ramp during the current quarter, adding momentum to Nvidia’s data center business in the second half of the year.
Blackwell Ultra’s performance-per-watt advantage is central to the firm’s argument. AI data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity. A chip that produces more computing performance per watt reduces operating costs and helps customers manage limited power capacity.
The firm highlighted two metrics it expects to become increasingly important as AI moves into commercial deployment. Tokens per minute, which measures how quickly a model generates output. Cost per token, which measures how expensive that output is. Oppenheimer says Nvidia is best in class on both.
Nvidia’s advantage isn’t just the GPU itself. The full-stack platform includes GPUs, networking switches, network interface cards, InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity, NVLink interconnects and CUDA software. Once a customer builds a data center around that stack, switching costs become real.
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Vera CPU China H200 and additional Nvidia revenue upside
Oppenheimer expects Nvidia’s Vera CPU to generate approximately $20 billion in revenue in 2026, on a similar scale to Intel and AMD’s CPU businesses, as TheStreet reported.
That widens the Nvidia revenue story beyond accelerators. Data center operators who already buy Nvidia GPUs could increasingly buy a more complete package from a single vendor.
China is the other potential upside. Oppenheimer estimates H200 accelerator sales in China could exceed $50 billion. U.S. export restrictions can change, and policy shifts could alter timing or size. It is upside optionality rather than a base case, but it is a large enough number to move the model meaningfully if conditions align.
Wall Street NVDA price targets ahead of August 26 earnings
Oppenheimer is not alone in its bullish stance. Stifel reiterated a Buy at $282. TD Cowen maintained Buy at $275. Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya set a $350 target and models third-quarter guidance of $107 billion to $108 billion. Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider holds a Buy with a $285 target and expects meaningful upside to guidance, Investing.com reported.
Moody’s has affirmed Nvidia’s Aa1 senior unsecured rating with a positive outlook. S&P Global Ratings maintained its AA issuer credit rating.
The spread between Oppenheimer’s $265 and BofA’s $350 reflects genuine disagreement about how much of Nvidia’s future growth is already priced in.
What Nvidia needs to do on August 26 is clear. Beat the quarter, raise guidance, show that Blackwell Ultra is ramping as expected, and give investors something specific on the VR200 and Vera Rubin timeline. The stock has already absorbed a lot of bad news. A clean print with strong forward commentary could change the mood quickly. Merely meeting expectations while the broader market is nervous about bond yields and AI financing may not be enough.
Related: Wall Street sends strong signal to Nvidia stock investors
