By Adam Clark

Nvidia stock was edging down early Tuesday. But a positive take from a Wall Street analyst and impressive efficiency metrics for its artificial-intelligence chips should reassure investors.

The chip maker's shares were down 1.1% at $180.78 in premarket trading. The stock is down 2% this year so far through to Friday's close.

Wall Street is looking to the company's earnings report, due Feb. 25, as a catalyst to get the stock moving upward again.

"We expect better results and guidance as GB300 [Blackwell AI hardware] continues to ramp through 1H26...AI demand is supported by ever-increasing hyperscale capex plans," wrote Susquehanna analyst Christopher Rolland in a research note on Tuesday.

Rolland has a Positive rating and $250 target price on Nvidia stock, arguing the key is whether the company can deliver even more than the $500 billion in cumulative revenue from Blackwell and next-generation Rubin chips it previously said it could generate from early 2025 through 2026.

"We still view Nvidia as having one of the largest opportunity sets ahead," Rolland wrote.

One of the big questions for Nvidia is whether it can maintain its market-leading position as demand for chips shifts toward inference -- the process of generating answers or results from models -- over training. The need for inference is expected to surge with the growth of AI agents, or programs that can take instructions and carry out multistep tasks.

So Nvidia was celebrating this week as data published by semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis suggested the company's latest Blackwell systems deliver up to 50 times higher throughput per megawatt than its previous Hopper generation, a key efficiency metric for inference.

"This performance gain translates into superior economics, with Nvidia GB300 lowering costs compared with the Hopper platform across the entire latency spectrum," Nvidia said in a statement Monday. "The most dramatic reduction occurs at low latency, where agentic applications operate: up to 35x lower cost per million tokens compared with the Hopper platform."

The company also said its coming Vera Rubin hardware will deliver up to 10 times higher throughput per megawatt compared with Blackwell.

Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was falling 2.2% and Broadcom was down 1.5% in premarket trading.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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February 17, 2026 07:15 ET (12:15 GMT)

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