I remember covering Nvidia (NVDA) during the Covid pandemic years, when it was still a gaming graphics-card story.
For perspective, it closed out in November 2021, trading around $32 split-adjusted, according to StatMuse, which is about what you’d probably pay for a couple of McDonald’s runs.
Sure, it was still a solid tech stock, an $81 billion one at that, but far from being the backbone of AI.
Then OpenAI released its now ubiquitous AI chatbot in ChatGPT in late 2022, CNBC reported, and everything just snapped into focus.
Almost overnight, Nvidia stopped being a niche tech play and became a mission-critical part of a new era in computing.
From 2024 to 2025, Nvidia surged past a $3 trillionmarket cap, according to S&P Global, and later over $4 trillion (worth 50x more than in late 2021).
A $10,000 bet on Nvidia about three years ago could potentially be worth an eye-popping $123,000 today (a staggering 1,132% gain).
Over the past year, Nvidia has delivered roughly 40% gains to investors.
Since then, the narrative continues to expand, with Nvidia being a critical enabler of the AI arms race.
That backdrop helps explain why veteran tech analyst Dan Ives is still pounding the table. Ives is of the opinion that Mr. Market is still underestimating how long and big this AI buildout will be.
He now sets a head-spinning $250 base-case target for Nvidia by the end of 2026, which represents a 33% gain from its current price at $187.67 (at the time of writing).
Ives is betting that the AI story some investors think they’ve missed is just getting started.
Nvidia stock drew attention after an analyst issued a bold 2026 price target.Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON on Getty Images
Dan Ives is the managing director and global head of tech research at Wedbush Securities, and he’s one of Wall Street’s most-quoted analysts in the technology space.
What sets him apart is that he isn’t shy in dishing out big numbers on big themes and then explaining his rationale in plain English on TV.
Ives has built a rock-solid reputation leaning into tech cycles early, including areas like cloud computing, EVs, and today’s AI-powered stock market boom.
More Nvidia:
His investing focus is on secular growth, catalyst-driven technology, and a sharp focus on major platform shifts.
For perspective, on TipRanks, Ives is rated as a five-star analyst, boasting a 56% success rate across an eyebrow-raising 500 ratings, backed by an average return of about 16% per call.
That track record matters immensely, especially when he takes bold positions.
For Ives, his massive $250 call on Nvidia has everything to do with earnings power that Wall Street hasn’t fully modeled.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, he argues that the market still underestimates how critical Nvidia is to every part of the AI stack, covering everything from training to inference to real-world deployment.
His incredible conviction in the stock rests primarily on Nvidia’s immense scale and positioning.
Jan. 2022:$9.8 billion baseline year before the AI earnings started to materialize
Jan. 2023:$4.4 billion (-55% year over year), a down year as the video gaming giant saw its game-related and data-center demand soften ahead of the AI boom
Jan. 2024:$29.8 billion (+581% year over year), the AI inflection point
Jan. 2025:$72.9 billion (+145% year over year), when scale kicked in, and margins grew at a breakneck pace, with Nvidia’s AI dominance showing up in profits
Trailing 12 months:$99.2 billion, representing run-rate earnings that felt virtually impossible just two years ago Source: Seeking Alpha
Nvidia sits upstream of hyperscalers, enterprises, and governments that are racing ahead in developing AI infrastructure.
Ives also believes that geopolitical shifts and evolving trade dynamics are currently being mispriced, as enterprise AI adoption remains far from mature.
So if estimates move even modestly higher, the math starts to work quickly.
The biggest mistake investors continue to make, according to Ives, is that they feel the AI trade is already crowded.
In fact, he feels it’s the complete opposite, with the market only in year three of an eight-to 10-year buildout, which is why the choppiness hasn’t broken the underlying trend.
To illustrate his point further, he says only about 3% of U.S. companies are meaningfully using AI today, with most still in the evaluation or pilot phase.
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Hence, Ives focuses a lot less on hype cycles and more on enterprise-related spending. Corporations are budgeting instead of just experimenting in the past.
In fact, Goldman Sachs states that AI companies could invest north of $500 billion in 2026, saying that analyst capex estimates have consistently underestimated the buildout.
Capital expenditures linked to AI infrastructure have risen a lot quicker than forecasts, surprising investors who were splitting hairs about market pullbacks just a year ago.
On top of that, Ives points to a major geopolitical shift at work.
For the first time in decades, he feels that the U.S. has regained a decisive lead over China in core technology, which adds new layers to the AI story.
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This story was originally published by TheStreet on Dec 25, 2025, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
