Barclays Raises Nvidia Target to $240 - Predicting 35.6% Explosive Growth

Nvidia just got a massive vote of confidence from Wall Street.

Barclays boosts price target to $240 - signaling 35.6% upside potential that's turning heads across trading floors.

The AI Chip Dominance

Nvidia continues crushing the semiconductor space with relentless innovation. Their GPUs aren't just for gamers anymore - they're powering the entire AI revolution from data centers to autonomous vehicles.

Market Momentum Building

With this upgraded target, Barclays essentially bets that Nvidia's growth story has plenty of runway left. The 35.6% projected gain would make traditional investors blush - if they weren't too busy counting their crypto profits.

Wall Street's favorite pastime? Playing catch-up with technology that's already moved three generations ahead while they were recalculating their spreadsheets.

Nvidia signs billion-dollar deals while others raise cash

In O’Malley’s view, the impact of these moves is already visible in the broader AI landscape. He said, “With the wave of announcements that have come over the last 6-9mo, we now estimate over $2T of planned spend at ~40GW of power in total.”

That figure includes government, corporate, and private efforts to build massive AI systems that need tons of compute power. Much of that demand flows straight into Nvidia’s GPU business, which fuels everything from large language models to recommendation engines.

The recent deals are happening alongside fresh funding efforts elsewhere. On Thursday, Nscale, a British AI infrastructure firm based in London, announced it had raised $1.1 billion in Series B funding. Norwegian investment firm Aker led the round.

Other backers include Nvidia, Nokia, and Dell. The money will be used to build AI data centers across Europe, especially in the U.K., where Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia recently launched multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects through Nscale.

Barclays isn’t alone in backing Nvidia. Of the 66 firms that cover the stock, 60 have it rated as a buy or strong buy, based on LSEG data. And even though Nvidia’s shares dipped by 1% on Thursday morning, they’re still up about 31% since the start of the year.

So far, Nvidia’s performance has been driven by massive chip sales to OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta; all hungry for the hardware that powers generative AI.

The OpenAI-Nvidia cash loop

But not everyone is thrilled. Some analysts are warning about how the cash is moving in circles, with no clear value being created. Jamie Zakalik, analyst at Neuberger Berman, pointed out that the latest Nvidia–OpenAI deal is just another example of money cycling back into the same players.

“The Nvidia deal is the latest example of OpenAI raising money that it pours right back into the company providing the capital,” Jamie said. The concern is that companies like Microsoft invest in OpenAI, which then spends that cash on chips from Nvidia, giving everyone a revenue boost, without making anything new.

Jamie added, “It’s goosing up everyone’s earnings and everyone’s numbers, but it’s not actually creating anything.” That statement echoes what many skeptics have been whispering across trading desks: the numbers are growing, but the output isn’t.

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