BNP Paribas raised Nvidia’s target price to $345 from $285, suggesting a 47% upside. The brokerage kept an ‘Outperform’ rating, noting the chipmaker’s platform remains a key advantage. Experts said, “Nvidia’s advantage is becoming more relevant as AI moves beyond training.” The company also recently increased its buyback by $150 billion.

Chipmaking giant and ‘Magnificent Seven’ favourite Nvidia, which registered multiple record highs in 2026, is likely to continue the same momentum, according to projections by BNP Paribas.

According to an The Economic Times report, the brokerage has retained its ‘Outperform’ rating on Nvidia, raising its target price to $345 from $285. It projects that the chipmaker’s full-stack platform remains a key advantage that rivals will struggle to replicate. Mint could not independently verify the report.

The latest target price indicates a potential 47% upside from Friday’s closing price. The stock has not crossed the $300 mark, with its previous all-time high at $237, which it touched last week.

The strong bullish outlook also comes at a time when the Street is concerned about rising competition and major technology companies gradually moving towards building custom chips. However, the brokerage said that Nvidia’s advantage is becoming more relevant as AI moves beyond training towards increasingly complex inference workloads.

It sees Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform as evidence that the company is adapting to the next stage of AI. The platform brings together GPUs, CPUs, networking and other components into an integrated rack-scale system designed for agentic AI, where models have to reason through multi-step tasks, call tools and handle longer contexts.

These workloads require more than raw computing power, making memory, networking and the ability to move information quickly across the system increasingly important. BNP Paribas argues that Nvidia’s combination of its CUDA software ecosystem and NVLink hardware architecture could give it an advantage over individual chip competitors.

The brokerage expects Nvidia to retain at least three-fourths of the AI compute market in dollar terms, even as AMD and custom accelerators from major technology companies gain ground.

Networking is another increasingly important piece of the puzzle. As AI systems scale beyond individual GPUs and into larger racks, the ability to connect and move data between those systems becomes critical. BNP Paribas expects Nvidia’s networking business to become a major differentiator as these architectures expand.

The brokerage also expects Nvidia to maintain gross margins above 70% despite intensifying competition. Its valuation framework uses 15 times CY28 earnings, plus cash, to arrive at the $345 target.

Nvidia expands buyback by $150 billion

Last week, the company increased the size of its buyback program by $150 billion, using its massive balance sheet to repurchase its own stock. The company expects to execute the total remaining program through fiscal year 2028.

The additional authorization surpassed Apple’s $110 billion increase in 2024, marking the biggest-ever increase in a stock repurchase program. In a separate filing, the company said it had introduced an Open Agent Safety Platform for AI agents that places monitoring and security controls outside the AI model.

It said its Open Agent Safety Platform brings together its OpenShell and Sentry technologies to create an independent layer for monitoring, policy enforcement and security around AI agents.

Last month, the US chip giant announced blockbuster second-quarter results, with revenue for the July fiscal quarter more than doubling to $96.2 billion, while adjusted profit came in at $2.22 per share.

Revenue from the data center segment reached $89 billion, representing a 117% jump from the previous year, while edge-computing revenue rose 27% year-on-year to $7.2 billion.