Nvidia Stock vs. Broadcom Stock: A Wall Street Analyst Says Buy One and Sell the Other

Most Wall Street analysts think Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) are deeply undervalued. Nvidia's median target price of $265 per share implies 50% upside from its current share price of $177. Coincidentally, Broadcom's median target price of $472.50 per share also implies 50% upside from its current share price of $314.

Jay Goldberg at Seaport Research has a different take. He has a sell rating on Nvidia, and his target price of $140 per share implies 21% downside. But Goldberg recommends buying Broadcom, though his target price of $430 per share is below the Wall Street consensus.

Here's what investors should know about these AI infrastructure stocks.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Nvidia: The stock Jay Goldberg recommends selling

Nvidia is the leading supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, and the company is unlikely to lose its dominant position any time soon. Not only are its graphics processing units (GPUs) the industry standard in AI accelerator chips, frequently setting performance records across training and inference workloads, but its CUDA software platform is also the industry standard in AI application development.

Former analyst Tae Kim, currently the senior technology writer at Barron's, recently explained, "Despite Nvidia's reputation as a semiconductor company, the power of its software prowess is often underestimated. More than half of the company's engineers work on software."

However, Jay Goldberg is concerned about the circular nature of many of Nvidia's investments. The company has signed cloud service agreements totaling $27 billion in the next six years to support its research and development. But Goldberg views that spending as a form of rebate because Nvidia is renting its own technology back from customers.

Additionally, Nvidia has made or plans to make equity investments totaling $40 billion in customers Anthropic, CoreWeave, and OpenAI, providing them with the cash flow needed to purchase AI infrastructure. Bulls would say Nvidia is helping those companies reach scale, but bears could argue Nvidia is artificially inflating demand for its products by paying those customers to buy its GPUs.

Finally, Goldberg is worried about increased competition from custom silicon, particularly tensor processing units (TPUs) developed by Alphabet's Google and Broadcom. While TPUs have a far less mature software ecosystem, they are still more cost-efficient than Nvidia GPUs for certain AI work because they strip out unnecessary parts of the chip. Several of Nvidia's largest customers use TPUs, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta Platforms.

Regardless, I think Goldberg is overly pessimistic. In the fourth quarter, Nvidia's adjusted earnings rose 82%, an acceleration from the previous quarter. And Wall Street expects adjusted earnings to increase at 53% annually through the fiscal year ending in January 2028. That makes the current valuation of 37 times earnings look cheap.

Broadcom: The stock Jay Goldberg recommends buying

Broadcom develops a broad range of semiconductors. Its core products are data center networking solutions and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) purpose-built to support artificial intelligence. However, the company also earns a substantial amount of revenue from legacy product lines such as connectivity, storage, and broadband chips and infrastructure software.

Nevertheless, Broadcom's leadership in high-end networking chips and custom silicon makes it Nvidia's most formidable competitor in AI infrastructure. Broadcom's Tomahawk switches are the industry standard in scale-out data center networking, which aggregates multiple server racks into a single cluster. Broadcom also holds about 60% market share in custom AI accelerators (ASICs called XPUs), which are an alternative to Nvidia GPUs.

Broadcom's best-known XPU is the tensor processing unit it designs for Alphabet, but the company also designs custom silicon solutions for Meta Platforms, ByteDance, OpenAI, and Anthropic. AI semiconductor sales increased 106% in the first quarter, and CEO Hock Tan expects that "momentum to accelerate as our custom AI XPUs hit the next phase of deployment among our five customers."

However, Broadcom is growing more slowly than Nvidia due to the drag created by legacy products. In the first quarter, total revenue increased 29% to $19.3 billion, and earnings increased 28% to $2.05 per diluted share. But that drag is diminishing as AI products become a large percentage of total sales. Management expects revenue growth to accelerate to 46% in the second quarter.

Looking ahead, Wall Street estimates Broadcom's earnings will increase at 66% annually through the fiscal year ending in November 2027. That makes the current valuation of 43 times earnings look relatively cheap. I think Nvidia is the better buy due to its dominant market position and cheaper valuation, but both AI stocks are attractive at current prices.

Trevor Jennewine has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.