Nvidia (NVDA) Stock: What Wall Street Expects at GTC 2026 on Monday

TLDR

• Nvidia’s GTC 2026 conference runs March 16–19, with CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote kicking things off Monday.
• Wall Street wants updates on supply of key components — wafers, memory, and optics — plus details on next-gen Vera Rubin chips.
• The company’s free cash flow is forecast to hit $178 billion this fiscal year, a potential all-time record for any company.
• 93% of analysts covering NVDA rate it a Buy, with an average price target of ~$267–$273, implying ~45–49% upside.
• Nvidia’s stock is down about 1% year-to-date, trading around $185, even as earnings estimates have been climbing.

Nvidia (NVDA) is heading into its most important week of the year. The annual GTC conference kicks off Monday, March 16, running through Thursday the 19th. CEO Jensen Huang will deliver the opening keynote — almost certainly in his signature leather jacket.

NVIDIA Corporation, NVDA

The stock has been flat for months, hovering near $185 since last August. It dipped as much as 8% earlier this year before recovering. Yet Wall Street’s earnings forecasts have been moving higher, not lower.

Free cash flow for the fiscal year ending January 2027 is expected to reach $178 billion — an 85% jump from the prior year. To put that in context, Saudi Aramco set the all-time record for free cash flow in 2022 at around $150 billion. If Nvidia hits the consensus, it would become the most profitable company in history.

The year after, analysts expect that record to be broken again, with free cash flow hitting $233 billion in fiscal 2028.

What Investors Want to Hear

Analyst attention will focus on a few key areas. First, supply. Nvidia needs to show that shipments of its next-generation Vera Rubin chips are on track and orders are being filled as promised. Shortfalls here would unsettle the market quickly.

Second, AI spending durability. Hyperscalers like Amazon and Alphabet are collectively expected to spend $660 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. Amazon’s capex has already jumped from roughly $50–$60 billion per year to a projected $190 billion this year. Barclays forecasts that industrywide AI capex will peak around $1 trillion in 2028.

Third, product roadmap. The AI chip market is shifting from training — building models — to inference, which is putting those models to work. That shift changes what chips customers need.

Inference involves two stages: prefill, which processes input tokens all at once and favors parallel GPU computing, and decode, which generates output one token at a time and benefits from more specialized hardware.

The Groq Angle

Last year, Nvidia paid roughly $20 billion to license technology from chip startup Groq and acquire its talent. Groq specializes in LPUs — language processing units — which are designed to handle the decode stage of inference cheaply and efficiently.

Investors will be listening for details on how Groq’s LPU technology fits into Nvidia’s future chip portfolio. It’s a move that could help the company hold ground against hyperscalers developing their own in-house chips.

UBS describes the contrast between its bullish Nvidia earnings estimates and the stock’s current discount valuation as “seemingly unsustainable.” Despite that, UBS still calls a thesis-changing breakout from the conference “hard to see.”

At 17 times next fiscal year’s projected earnings, Nvidia currently trades at a discount to the S&P 500. Of 70 analysts covering the stock, 93% recommend buying it.

The average price target sits around $267–$273, implying between 45% and 49% upside from current levels.

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