Wall Street upgrades Nvidia and Alphabet’s stocks ahead of Wednesday earnings

Wall Street is pressing the gas on Nvidia and Alphabet ahead of their third-quarter earnings, scheduled for release on Wednesday.

Two investment firms, Stifel and Loop Capital, have raised their expectations for both tech stocks, forecasting upside based on surging demand for AI computing and improvements in advertising and cloud performance.

Stifel’s Ruben Roy stuck with his buy rating on Nvidia and pushed the stock’s price target up from $212 to $250, a 34% jump from where the stock stood on Monday.

Roy expects Nvidia to outperform Wall Street’s estimates this quarter, though not by a huge margin. His forecast is built on what he described as a “moderate” beat, shaped by past quarterly performance.

He also said the company’s current quarter guidance will likely be “optimistic”, citing recent comments made by CEO Jensen Huang during his GTC keynote in Washington, D.C.

In that talk, Jensen said Nvidia had already received over $500 billion in cumulative orders for its Blackwell and Rubin infrastructure, products scheduled to roll out between 2025 and 2026.

Ruben Roy sees Nvidia’s AI backlog and TAM pushing future revenue

Ruben noted that market consensus now supports Jensen’s earlier claim that Nvidia has around $350 billion in unfulfilled orders still on the books.

That backlog, along with continued demand for accelerated computing, is forming the base of Roy’s long-term bet. He projected the company’s total addressable market (TAM) to exceed $100 billion by the end of 2025, with the potential to grow toward $1 trillion in the longer term.

While he acknowledged Nvidia’s legacy businesses (Gaming, Automotive, and Professional Visualization) he said the company’s big opportunity is in accelerated computing, which refers to chips made for running large-scale AI systems, not everyday PCs.

“The shift from general purpose computes to accelerated compute represents the company’s most significant revenue and profitability growth opportunity over the next several years,” Roy wrote.

Ruben’s team, after speaking with industry contacts and digging into recent data, sees AI demand climbing.

“We continue to view NVDA as best positioned to benefit,” he added. Shares of Nvidia have already gone up 39% in 2025, and the firm is betting that number will keep climbing once earnings drop.

Loop Capital raises Alphabet to buy, eyes Gemini and Google Cloud growth

Over at Loop Capital, Rob Sanderson upgraded Alphabet from hold to buy and lifted the price target from $260 to $320, which would be a 19% upside from where the stock closed Monday.

Rob said that fears around AI disrupting Google’s ad business are easing. Specifically, he pointed to Google Search revenue growing 15% in Q3, the fastest rate since the COVID boom.

In a note, Rob wrote: “Continued strength is disproving concerns (or at least postponing concerns) that AI chatbots are encroaching on Google as a primary starting point for the information seeking journey of users.”

He pointed to the performance of Gemini, Google’s AI-powered app, now used by more than 650 million people, with query volume tripling in just one quarter.

He also mentioned recent press reports that Google may now be Apple’s preferred AI provider, suggesting the company is climbing higher in the competitive ladder. He said this could open up new opportunities in mobile integration.

Rob also said Google Cloud is now pulling in more revenue than ever, with 35% year-over-year growth in the third quarter, reaching an annual run rate of $61 billion. He called Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), an internal AI chip, a major part of that growth story.

“Impressive price-performance benchmarks are making the Google TPU a differentiated driver for the cloud business as the company makes this internal advantage on compute economics available to third-party customers,” Rob wrote.

Alphabet stock is currently up by 51% year-to-date.

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