Analysts May Still Be Underestimating Nvidia's Long-Term Growth Potential

Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) stellar third-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings (ended Oct. 26, 2025) prompted a wave of analyst upgrades. The consensus target price of $256.95 is more than 45% above the company's closing share price on Dec. 16.

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Even then, I contend that analysts may still be underestimating the company's long-term growth potential. Here's why.

Record order visibility

Nvidia reports exceptionally high order visibility of $500 billion for Blackwell and Rubin systems from the start of 2025 through the end of calendar year 2026. Of this, about $150 billion has already been shipped.

Nvidia has also entered into a few deals, which can expand its demand visibility beyond $500 billion. These include an expanded partnership with the Saudi Public Investment Fund's AI company, HUMAIN, to deploy 400,000 to 600,000 GPUs over the next three years. Nvidia has also collaborated with Anthropic to provide underlying GPU infrastructure for training its next-generation frontier models, with up to one gigawatt of compute capacity.

Bank of America analysts have now claimed that Nvidia has demand and supply visibility into at least $500 billion of sales over calendar years 2025 and 2026, while the partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic represent incremental upside beyond this baseline.

Hence, Nvidia's consensus revenue estimates for the next few years appear conservative given the visibility of this record demand.

China catalyst

Nvidia also stands to benefit from the U.S. government's approval to sell Nvidia's advanced H200 chips to China, despite 25% of the revenue required to be paid to the U.S. Treasury. While not yet guaranteed, this move could be a significant step toward reopening the Chinese market, which had once contributed an estimated 20% to 25% of Nvidia's total data center sales. Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers expects this policy change to boost the company's annual revenue by $25 billion to $30 billion. Nvidia also seems to be responding to this opportunity, as it may be evaluating current production capacity for H200 chips.

Aggressive product cadence

Nvidia's aggressive product cadence, which involves refreshing its GPU architecture every 12 to 18 months, has accelerated the silicon replacement cycle globally. The company is now promising an annual product cadence and has already launched the Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra systems. Nvidia now plans to launch new GPU architectures, including Rubin in 2026, Rubin Ultra in 2027, and Feynman by 2028.

By introducing dramatic improvements in performance and cost efficiency to adapt to the evolving demands of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, the company has incentivized customers to upgrade infrastructure more frequently. Clients are also increasingly preferring the GPUs over custom silicon alternatives, which typically follow a slower three to five-year refresh cadence. Analysts may not have fully accounted for the impact of this accelerated demand in their revenue estimates.

Supply chain management

Morgan Stanley has projected global demand for Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging wafers to reach 1 million units by 2026. Of these, Nvidia is expected to book approximately 595,000 CoWoS wafers, representing approximately 60% of available capacity by 2026.

Nvidia had purchase commitments worth $50.3 billion at the end of the third quarter. This includes long-term supply contracts for CoWoS packaging, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, and other crucial components. By controlling the supply chain, the company has managed to optimize costs, which is reflected in its strong margins.

Software moat

In addition to hardware, Nvidia has built a robust software ecosystem around its CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) stack, including platforms such as DGX Cloud and AI Foundry. With a developer base of over 5 million, using the CUDA parallel programming platform to optimize GPU programming, software plays a crucial role in building a loyal customer base for the company.

Valuation

Despite the robust tailwinds, Nvidia is currently trading at 23.1 times forward earnings and a price-to-earnings-to-growth ratio of only 0.48. For a company with multiyear revenue visibility, aggressive product cadence, and robust supply chain, these valuation multiples seem relatively modest.

Analysts appear to expect significant normalization in Nvidia's revenue beyond 2026. This is evident from the company's long-term projections, with revenue projected to grow from nearly $213 billion in fiscal 2026 (ending Jan. 31, 2026) to approximately $555.5 billion in fiscal 2031 (ending Jan. 31, 2031).

Nvidia expects the annual AI infrastructure opportunity to be worth $3 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030. The company could reasonably capture 20% to 25% of this market by the end of the decade, given that lead technology analyst Beth Kindig estimates Nvidia currently accounts for nearly half of the AI spending. So, there is a high probability that Nvidia's annual revenue will fall within the range of $600 billion to $1 trillion, which is still higher than the analyst consensus revenue estimates.

Manali Pradhan, CFA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.