Financial analysts at HSBC, the largest bank in Europe, have become very excited this week about NVIDIA's stock prospects. They have established that the American multinational technology company is set to grow due to an increased demand globally for hardware relating to artificial intelligence (AI) processing. HSBC's team of analysts have raised the recommendation on Nvidia stock (NASDAQ:NVDA) to "Buy" from "Reduce" - the reason being that AI business segments are on the rise and NVIDIA is well positioned to meet demand which: "more than offsets our previous concerns over a datacenter slowdown and rising inventory levels."

HSBC's price target on NVIDIA stock has more than doubled to $355 per share (from the previous $175), and the analysts claim that their past estimates were wrong and undervalued because of wider market trends in the server business: "We were too focused on the slowdown in datacenters, but what really surprised us was its pricing power on AI chips." Hence the analysts' call to double the NVIDIA stock target, in anticipation of excellent fiscal performance going into 2024. News reports point out an immediate 4.1% jump in stock following HSBC's recommendations. The chipmaker's shares have surged up to 140%, its highest position in a year, from a low period in October 2022.

In an interview with The Guardian, NVIDIA's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Michael Kagan added his remarks on the company and its cryptocurrency position. Being the maker of the world's most powerful graphics cards and compute accelerators, NVIDIA is the most prominent player in the industry regarding any computing application from cryptocurrencies to AI and HPC. In the interview, Mr. Kegan expressed his opinions and argued that newly found applications such as ChatGTP bring much higher value to society compared to cryptocurrencies. "All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn't bring anything useful for society. AI does," said Kegan, adding that "I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. But you don't redirect the company to support whatever it is."

When it comes to AI and other applications, the company has a very different position. "With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: you just tell it what to do, and it will. And if it doesn't work the way you want it to, you tell it 'I want something different," he added, arguing that the new AI applications have usability level beyond that of crypto. Interestingly, trading applications are also familiar to NVIDIA, as they had clients (banks) using their hardware for faster trading execution. Mr. Kegan noted: "We were heavily involved in also trading: people on Wall Street were buying our stuff to save a few nanoseconds on the wire, the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibers under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange."

Technology Companies, Venture Capitalists and Startups are in panic after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday, March 11, 2023. In the short term it will be a mess - customers of SVB have no access to FDIC insured deposits until Monday (March 13). Customers with investments below a $250,000 cap have been advised to make claims before a strict Monday deadline. The FDIC is forming plans to pay depositors, with investments greater than the aforementioned cap, a special dividend next week.