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NVIDIA shares are up nearly 200 percent so far this year. It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that Wall Street continues to salivate over the AI-fueled stock, given the street’s well-known penchant for chasing momentum, to the detriment of more sedate names such as AMD.

Morgan Stanley moves Nvidia to Top Pick over $AMD, ups price target

Morgan Stanley raised the firm's price target on $NVDA to $500 from $450 and keeps an Overweight rating on the shares.

— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) June 16, 2023

To wit, Morgan Stanley has now replaced AMD with NVIDIA as its “top pick” stock, pegging a share price target of $500. For reference, the high-flying stock closed at $426.53 on Thursday.

Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore cited the stock's "higher probability of upward revisions near term" as the primary catalyst for this upgrade. The analyst noted:

"We see Nvidia as the cleanest story in AI hardware and believe it continues to deserve more consideration from investors looking for AI exposure."

NVIDIA has guided to around $11 billion in revenue in the ongoing quarter, corresponding to a 55 percent upside relative to the street consensus just a few weeks back. According to JP Morgan, the chipmaker would remain the primary beneficiary of AI-related spending this year, scooping up as much as 60 percent of the proverbial pie. Nonetheless, AMD is moving fast in the cloud computing segment, managing to grow its market share by a whopping 77 percent on an annual basis in April 2023, as per a recent report from JP Morgan. On an absolute basis, however, Intel is still the market leader in the cloud computing segment, with NVIDIA at a distant third spot.

NVIDIA continues to launch new products to cash in on the hype around AI. At the Computex 2023, the GPU maker announced the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip. The chip combines the Grace CPU and Hopper GPU architecture for “giant-scale AI and HPC” applications by delivering computing power of 1 exaflop.

Investors also expect NVIDIA to corner a significant chunk of the AI training market via a dedicated suite of products under the ambit of its AI Foundation Services to enable clients to create and run customized generative AI models. Powered by its AI supercomputers and the DGX Cloud, NVIDIA’s AI Foundation Services currently boasts three main products: NeMo for text-based generative AI applications, Picasso for image-based AI applications, and BioNeMo for applications related to protein structure, sequencing, and molecular docking.