Nvidia (NVDA.US) receives a pre-earnings boost from KeyBanc: Despite the GB200 production bottleneck, the growth momentum remains strong, and the target price is raised to $190.

Investment bank KeyBanc said Nvidia NVDA.US could post a "strong" performance in both its results and guidance when it reports its quarterly earnings next week despite production constraints on its GB200NVL servers. The firm reiterated its "overweight" rating on Nvidia and raised its price target to $190 from $180.

John Vinh, an analyst at KeyBanc, noted in a client note: "Despite concerns over the limited ramp of GB200NVL server capacity, we expect Nvidia's fourth-quarter results to be strong and beat expectations, and we expect a conservative but above-consensus guidance for the first quarter."

Vinh said, "While the production constraints on GB200NVL racks did impact shipments, the following factors fully offset this: We believe customers have been able to defer GB200 orders and supplement with B200 servers based on the HGX with x86 head nodes due to the low initial yield on GB200NVL; Chinese cloud service providers are aggressively buying H20 GPUs due to the surge in DeepSeek demand and limited supply of Huawei's Ascend AI chips; and we observe Nvidia customers, particularly cloud service providers, are financing inventory through EMS factories, so shipments to EMS can be confirmed as actual revenue."

Nvidia is scheduled to report its earnings after the market closes on February 26, with consensus expecting revenue of $26.04 billion and earnings per share of $0.61.