Wall Street analysts and industry experts offered mixed reactions to NVIDIA Corp.'s (NASDAQ:NVDA) ambitious technological roadmap unveiled at CES 2025 on Monday, particularly regarding its artificial intelligence and autonomous driving initiatives.
What Happened: During his keynote address at Las Vegas's Mandalay Bay Arena, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sparked debate with his prediction that self-driving vehicles would become "the first multi-trillion dollar robotics industry."
Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, praised the presentation, declaring "Nvidia has changed the world" and anticipating "incredible things to come."
Wow. Amazing. Lots to digest. Nvidia has changed the world for sure. Incredible things to come... Great night for technology, great start to CES. $nvda
— Ross Gerber (@GerberKawasaki) January 7, 2025
GLJ Research analyst Gordon Johnson strongly contested this view, warning that widespread autonomous vehicles could trigger "depressions globally" by displacing transport workers.
Translation. Every transport-based worker will be out of a job b/c of self-driving cars that NO ONE asked for (the original promise was they were good for the environment). This will never happen. Would cause depressions globally.
— Gordon Johnson (@GordonJohnson19) January 7, 2025
The presentation also highlighted Nvidia's collaboration with Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) on refining open-source Llama models. Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, suggested this partnership could potentially outperform OpenAI, noting that "open source wins out here."
Next leveling open-source models...
NVIDIA Llama Nemotron...
Basically, taking and tuning the open-source models from Meta. And accelerating for use cases like small models, language, training models etc.
Doesn't it feel like Meta + NVIDIA has a really good shot at being a... pic.twitter.com/KcI5PP0wZc— Daniel Newman (@danielnewmanUV) January 7, 2025
The chipmaker unveiled its next-generation GeForce RTX 5000 series graphics cards, headlined by the flagship RTX 5090 priced at $1,999. Nvidia claims the new GPU delivers twice the performance of its predecessor, featuring 32GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores. The company plans to release the RTX 5090 and 5080 on Jan. 30, with more affordable models following later.
Huang also introduced the Grace Blackwell NVLink 72 system, incorporating 72 Blackwell GPUs and 2,592 Grace CPU cores, designed to power advanced AI applications. TECHnalysis Research's Bob O'Donnell highlighted the significance of Nvidia's refined Llama models, suggesting they "could have a big impact."
Next announcement from @nvidia keynote is much more obscure, but refined versions of Llama models could have a big impact. #CES2025 pic.twitter.com/2aEFjjxbjx
— Bob O'Donnell (@bobodtech) January 7, 2025
Price Action: Nvidia's stock ended Monday's trading session at $149.43, up 3.43%, and added another 0.57% in after-hours trading to reach $150.28. However, it dipped 0.54% in Robinhood Markets' overnight trading service. Over the past year, Nvidia has gained an impressive 185.99%, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
Nvidia's consensus price target is $170.56, ranging from $220 to $120. Recent ratings average $154.67, implying a 2.92% upside.
