During the first trading period after AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) impressive Q2 earnings announcement, graphics chip competitor Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) touched a new all-time high in morning trading Wednesday.
Shares of Nvidia surged as high as $169.93 in morning hours, which marked a 2.78% gain from Tuesday’s close. The stock slumped back down a bit by early afternoon, but today’s price action underscores the strength of the graphics chip market—which was on display in AMD’s latest report.
AMD surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimates for earnings and revenue, notching year-over-year sales growth of 19% in the process. The highlight of the report was the company’s staggering 51% growth in its computing and graphics unit, and although this was boosted by sales of the new Ryzen GPUs, graphics demand was strong as well.
(Also read: Strong Ryzen Sales Help AMD Post Q2 Earnings and Revenue Beats)
“Our second quarter results demonstrate strong growth driven by leadership products and focused execution,” said AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “Our Ryzen desktop processors, Vega GPUs, and EPYC datacenter products have received tremendous industry recognition.”
A strong graphics chip market should be encouraging news for investors as we head towards Nvidia’s second-quarter report in the coming weeks. Nvidia has shifted towards a machine learning and AI focus recently, but the company still brings in plenty of revenue on the consumer level, where it directly competes with AMD in the gaming market.
While AMD’s success might mean that Nvidia has lost some market share, it is likely a positive indicator of rising overall demand. On top of video gaming, Nvidia and AMD have benefitted from the astronomical rise of bitcoin and ethereum over the past year, as more and more people build powerful machines—using high-end graphics chips—to “mine” these cryptocurrencies.
Looking ahead, our current consensus estimates are calling for Nvidia to post EPS growth of 60% and revenue growth of 37% this quarter. These impressive growth rates have helped the stock earn a “B” grade for Growth in our Style Scores system, and they’ve contributed to Nvidia’s status as one of the most popular growth picks on Wall Street right now.
NVDA has also been a scorching hot momentum stock, with shares gaining more than 190% over the past year. In 2017 alone, NVDA has soared nearly 60%, making it one of the year’s hottest stocks.
Furthermore, the company has put together quite the earnings track record, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by an average of 27% in each of the trailing four quarters. This should give investors even more confidence in this Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stock as we approach its earnings report date.
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