2026년 2월 22일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance
Investing.com -- Here are the biggest analyst moves in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) for this week.
Buy Nvidia stock ahead of second-half outperformance, Citi says
Citi is urging investors to add to Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) positions ahead of what it expects to be a period of share outperformance in the second half of 2026 (1H26), citing strong product momentum and improving demand visibility into 2027.
In a preview note, analyst Atif Malik said the firm expects Nvidia to report January-quarter revenue of $67 billion, “above Street $65.6B,” and guide to April-quarter sales of $73 billion versus consensus of $71.6 billion.
The bullish view is partly driven by the company’s product cycle. Malik expects the continued ramp of the B300 and the Rubin platform to drive a 34% half-over-half acceleration in calendar second-half 2026 sales, compared with 27% in the first half of the year.
He noted that “most investors are looking past the earnings,” toward Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in mid-March, where the company is expected to detail its inference roadmap using Groq’s low-latency SRAM IP and provide an “early outlook for 2026/27 AI sales.”
On profitability, the analyst models fiscal 2027 gross margin at roughly 75% and assumes operating-expense growth in the high-30% range, broadly in line with fiscal 2026 trends.
Addressing concerns around elevated hyperscaler capital spending, the analyst said these investments “will deliver long-term returns” as AI infrastructure demand continues to drive cloud-revenue growth.
He also acknowledged rising competition in inference but expects Nvidia to “continue to be the leader across both training and reasoning focused inference workloads.”
Citi maintained its Buy rating and $270 price target, concluding the stock “looks attractive with the stock likely to outperform in 2H26 as demand visibility extends into 2027.”
Morgan Stanley sees Amazon as an underappreciated GenAI winner
Morgan Stanley has named Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) its Top Pick, arguing both AWS and Retail remain underappreciated beneficiaries of the GenAI wave and positioning the company to drive — and capture — the next phase of AI-led disruption.
While investors continue to debate the returns from heavy AI capital spending, analyst Brian Nowak said he remains bullish “through this uncertainty” and highlighted two catalysts that could help re-rate the shares.
The first centers on the durability of AWS growth. Nowak said demand trends remain robust, with backlog levels supporting 30%+ growth “for quite some time.” However, he noted that the pace of acceleration is currently constrained by data center capacity coming online.
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He evaluates AI returns using a “capex yield analysis,” which measures incremental revenue relative to prior-year capital spending. In his base case, the implied yield sits about 50% below the long-term average, pointing to potential upside for AWS revenue if data center openings begin to catch up with investment.
Nowak estimates that every 5% improvement in yield would add roughly 130 basis points to AWS growth, with a move toward about $0.45 capable of pushing year-over-year AWS growth into the mid-30% range.
“As AWS opens more data centers, this "yield" should improve and AWS should continue to accelerate,” he wrote.
The second catalyst is agentic commerce. According to Nowak, Amazon’s expanding last-mile inventory, growing infrastructure and ongoing technology investment position the company to lead in both vertical and horizontal agentic shopping.
He noted that the company’s platform-specific agent Rufus is already contributing about 140 basis points to fourth-quarter 2025 gross merchandise value (GMV) growth.
Amazon has also acknowledged the need to “collectively figure out a better customer experience” with horizontal AI agents and said “we continue to have a number of conversations,” pointing to potential partnerships ahead.
“We look for AMZN horizontal agentic partnerships to emerge, which will make investors feel more confident in AMZN’s long-term positioning,” Nowak wrote.
Evercore adds Dell to Tactical Outperform list ahead of results
Evercore added Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL) to its Tactical Outperform list ahead of next week’s January-quarter results, saying the hardware maker is positioned to beat current revenue and earnings expectations.
The brokerage expects Dell to surpass consensus forecasts of $31.4 billion in revenue and $3.52 in EPS, supported by “strong near-term (NT) demand trends across traditional hardware (PCs/servers) and AI compute.”
Evercore also flagged memory pricing dynamics as a near-term tailwind. With concerns building around rising memory costs, it believes Dell “to have benefited from a demand pull-in across PCs and traditional servers as customers will have looked to get ahead of average selling price (ASP) increases.”
Within the Infrastructure Solutions Group, AI server demand remains central to the story. Dell exited the fiscal third quarter with AI orders of $12.3 billion and a backlog of $18.4 billion, and previously guided to fiscal 2026 AI server revenue of $25 billion. This outlook implies a step-up to more than $9 billion in January-quarter AI revenue, Evercore said.
On the client side, early IDC data indicates Dell gained about 100 basis points of market share in the fourth quarter, marking its first share gain in more than three years.
That said, Evercore expects some near-term margin pressure. Consensus currently points to roughly a 90 basis point sequential decline in gross margin to 20.2%, down 410 basis points year over year, partly reflecting early memory headwinds.
However, the firm noted that “DELL has already shifted to more dynamic pricing actions and a shorter quote window to better protect margins going forward.”
Looking further out, Evercore expects management to outline a path to at least high-single-digit revenue growth and low-to-mid-teens EPS growth into fisc…