Nvidia (NVDA) stock is up approximately 15.44% year to date as of this writing on Friday afternoon, May 29. Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 Index (SPY) is up approximately 11.06% in the same period.
While the stock has outperformed the S&P 500, its growth lags that of other semiconductor companies that are part of the AI boom.
These are the profits that other semiconductor companies achieved in the same period:
Sandisk (SNDK) is up 608.5%.
Micron (MU) is up 238%.
Intel (INTC) is up 221.64%.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) rose 140.23%.
Marvell (MRVL) is up 138.14%.
Broadcom (AVGO) is up 26.2%.
When we look at the great strides made by some of these companies, especially Intel, things start to look strange.
Intel reported a GAAP net loss of $3.73 billion, but it has recovered like crazy. Meanwhile, Nvidia reported very strong earnings and announced a big dividend increase, but it fell.
There are two reasons that slow down the action. It is already in the hands of most institutional investors. The other reason could be the upcoming big IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.
We must remember that SoftBank Group sold all of its Nvidia shares in November 2025 and invested that money in OpenAI.
Something similar may be happening now with this year’s “hottest” IPOs.
However, Nvidia is now preparing an attack that aims to make it an unstoppable force in the semiconductor industry.
Vera CPU opens new $200 billion total addressable market for Nvidia. Bloomberg/Getty Images
Nvidia delivers its first Vera CPUs
Nvidia confirmed that the first Vera CPUs arrived at Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI on May 15. Three days later, Oracle also received its units.
There are several reasons why the launch of this CPU is a game-changer for Nvidia. The company says Vera is “the world’s first processor designed specifically for the era of agent AI and reinforcement learning.”
What makes this CPU different is that unlike the previous generation Grace CPU, which was built on ARM’s Neoverse V2 cores, this one features custom “Olympus” cores from Nvidia (also based on the ARM architecture).
The Vera CPU features 88 Olympus cores and, according to Nvidia, offers twice the performance of the Grace CPU and is the first CPU to support the precision of the FP8.
Related: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sends a strong message to a major client
The importance of the Vera CPU was explained by Nvidia Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress during the first quarter earnings conference call:
“Vera CPU opens a new $200 billion market (total addressable market (TAM)) for Nvidia, a market we have never addressed before. All the major system and hyperscale manufacturers are partnering with us to implement it. We have visibility of almost $20 billion in total CPU revenue this year, setting us up to become the leading (global) CPU supplier.”
Not only does the CPU become less dependent on ARM’s design, but it now also aims to capture CPU market share from Intel and AMD through standalone sales, making it a game-changer for Nvidia.
Vera’s first benchmark is now available, but with one big caveat.
The first Vera benchmark is now available and was conducted by Michael Larabel of Phoronix. The specialized media outlet has been developing its Phoronix Test Suite for approximately 19 years.
The reason behind Nvidia’s choice of Phoronix is probably the business value of its Test Suite, as it can be used to find Linux kernel regressions, and Linux is the operating system used in data centers.
The results were very impressive, but they come with a caveat. Nvidia asked Phoronix to only perform a subset of the tests. That is, Nvidia must have run the test before contacting you and chosen only the tests where it was confident the CPU would perform well.
To further underline that this is very unusual, Larabel responded on the forums that he believes the last time such a situation occurred was when he was comparing the original ARM Calxeda server 16 years ago.
While it is very likely that the CPU would not have performed as well if all the testing had been done, Nvidia does not market this CPU as a general-purpose CPU. The other thing we need to keep in mind is that there is probably a lot of room for performance optimizations in your drivers.
Why Intel should be very worried about Vera and AMD will probably be fine for now
Instead of reviewing the long list of tests, we can look at the geometric mean results.
The results showed that Vera offered 10% better performance than the AMD EPYC 9575F. We should note here that the EPYC CPU has only 64 cores, compared to the Vera’s 88.
Additionally, while this is a high-frequency CPU, it was released in 2024. AMD is launching its Venice EPYC line, which is manufactured on TSMC’s 2nm node.
Thanks to a better manufacturing node and improved architecture, EPYC will most likely take the crown.
Phoronix also compared the Grace CPU to Vera and unlike Nvidia’s claim of being 2x faster, it got 1.63x more performance. Anyway, it’s very impressive, especially when we look at Intel; things get pretty crazy. Vera crushed Intel’s Granite Rapids Xeon 6980P, which has 128 cores, achieving 1.55 times the performance.
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Nvidia’s new CPU could be its Apple Silicon moment in the CPU space. Apple released the M1 chip, put pressure on Intel and AMD to make better CPUs, Vera will too. The harder Intel and AMD work to beef up their top-tier CPUs, the better it will be for consumers as there will be a trickle-down effect.
In the case of Vera, there won’t be a consumer-oriented CPU, but perhaps the next generation (not the incoming N1/N1X) of Nvidia’s laptop CPUs will feature new core designs.
What analysts think about Nvidia
In a May 25 research note shared with me, Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya and his team updated their view on Nvidia stock.
Analysts said they believe Nvidia is trading below its historical price-earnings (PE) multiples and price-earnings-growth (PEG) ratio.
According to the team, Nvidia’s historical 5-year PE multiple is 33.6 times, and its PEG ratio estimate for calendar year 2027 is 0.28 times.
Stocks with a PEG less than 1.0 are considered undervalued compared to their growth potential.
The team’s pro forma EPS estimates for fiscal 2027 and 2028 are $9.09 and $13.27, respectively.
Arya reiterated a buy rating on Nvidia shares and a $350 price target, based on a multiple of 26 of his price-to-earnings ratio estimate excluding cash for calendar year 2027, which is within Nvidia’s historical P/E range for the coming year of 25 to 56.
Tigress Financial has Nvidia shares in its Research Focus List and in its Focus Opportunity Portfolio.
Company analyst Ivan Feinseth updated his view on Nvidia stock following the earnings report.
The analyst said record first-quarter fiscal 2027 results showed demand from AI factories and rising returns on capital, and that Nvidia is the biggest beneficiary of AI development.
Feinseth reiterated a strong buy rating on Nvidia shares and raised the price target to $425 from $360.
Of 54 analyst ratings, 50 rate Nvidia as a buy, and only three rate it as a hold, with an average price target of $305.38, according to MarketBeat.
Downside risks for Nvidia:
Slowing spending on AI infrastructure,
Stock erosion due to increased competitive intensity,
This story was originally published by TheStreet on May 30, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investments section. Add TheStreet as a preferred source by clicking here.
