Nvidia's AGI Claim and Ecosystem Push Put Wall Street's Growth Models to the Test
Published on 09/09/2026 at 07:51 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Jensen Huang has never been shy about making bold pronouncements, but his latest declaration carries particular weight for investors trying to price the AI trade. Days after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3, the Nvidia chief executive declared that artificial general intelligence has arrived — a statement that cuts to the heart of the chipmaker's valuation thesis.
OpenAI itself has been more circumspect about the terminology. Co-founder Greg Brockman referred only to the dawn of an "AGI era," while CEO Sam Altman dismissed the label as "poorly defined." For Nvidia, however, the framing is less philosophical than commercial: the larger the models become, the more compute they demand, and the more money flows to the company supplying the silicon. GPT-6 Astra was trained on more than 100,000 Grace-Blackwell NVLink72 systems, with an additional 400,000 GPUs reportedly slated to come online.
The Numbers Behind the Ambition
The revenue trajectory supports Huang's confidence. Nvidia posted second-quarter sales of $96.2 billion, up 106 percent year over year, with gross margin holding at 75 percent on both a GAAP and adjusted basis. The company has guided to roughly $108 billion for the current quarter, plus or minus 2 percent.
Chief financial officer Colette Kress went further on the earnings call, projecting around 70 percent revenue growth for the full fiscal year 2028 — comfortably ahead of the 44 percent analysts had penciled in. Her rationale was strikingly matter-of-fact: the forecast is constrained by supply shortages, not by any lack of demand. Notably, the projection assumes zero data-center computing revenue from China, meaning the growth is expected to materialize entirely without the Chinese market.
That kind of expansion is what underpins the company's recent acquisition spree. On September 3, Nvidia announced the $12.93 billion takeover of Hugging Face, the AI model-sharing platform, structured as roughly $11.9 billion in cash plus up to $1 billion in stock earmarked for employee retention. It ranks as the second-largest deal in company history, trailing only the $20 billion acquisition of chip designer Groq in December.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nvidia?
Just two days earlier, Nvidia unveiled an expanded partnership with MediaTek, investing $3.5 billion in convertible bonds from the Taiwanese chipmaker. In exchange, MediaTek will adapt Nvidia's NVLink-Fusion platform for its own processors. The pattern is consistent: rather than simply selling chips, Nvidia is embedding its technology across the entire semiconductor ecosystem — from hardware to the software platforms where developers build their models.
Used Chips and the Depreciation Debate
The counter-argument to Nvidia's growth story has centered on how quickly its hardware loses value. Michael Burry, the investor famed for betting against the housing market, has accused the company of underestimating chip depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028.
Market data suggests otherwise. Huang has explicitly described H100 accelerators as "revenue-generating assets," and rental prices for the now several-year-old chips rose 22 percent in September to $3.28 per hour. Even six-year-old A100 chips retain an estimated residual value of around $4,956, according to Silicon Data, with CoreWeave having signed contracts for A100 capacity extending to 2029.
Traders on the prediction platform Kalshi are pricing a 74 percent probability that A100 rental rates will exceed $1.39 per hour by year-end, up from the current $1.29. For anyone modeling future writedowns, those market prices are difficult to ignore.
Insider Selling and the Road Ahead
The flurry of corporate activity has been accompanied by insider transactions that some market watchers might scrutinize. Director Mark A. Stevens sold 1,848,501 shares through a trust between August 31 and September 2, at prices ranging from $220 to $226. The sale is hardly a red flag in isolation — Stevens retains more than 26.5 million shares directly and indirectly — and such moves are frequently part of routine estate planning at companies of this scale.
The stock itself has been consolidating after a strong run. Shares slipped 2.5 percent on Tuesday to close at €193.90 in German trading, roughly 4 percent below the 52-week high of €202.50 set in mid-May. The equity remains comfortably above its 200-day moving average of €169.79 and has gained 21 percent since the start of the year, with a 33 percent advance over twelve months.
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Cantor Fitzgerald has maintained its buy rating with a price target of $350, implying roughly 55 percent upside according to analyst C.J. Muse, who cites persistent demand for AI infrastructure. The broader Wall Street consensus sits at "Strong Buy," with an average target of $325.23.
Two events on September 10 could provide fresh catalysts: the dividend record date for the next quarterly payout of $0.25 per share, and Nvidia's appearance at Goldman Sachs' Communacopia+Technology conference. Investors will be listening for details on the Rubin platform — which the company says has begun volume shipments and should account for 20 percent of data-center revenue in the third quarter — as well as the newly expanded CPU business, for which Nvidia has projected 70 percent growth in fiscal 2028.
Whether those updates validate the ambitious outlook will determine if the market's elevated expectations for AI names remain justified. For now, the debate has shifted from whether Nvidia can keep growing to whether anyone can accurately model just how fast.
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