Citi lifts Nvidia's price target on booming sovereign AI demand
Citi (C) is doubling down on Nvidia (NVDA), driven by what it sees as a major expansion in demand for AI infrastructure, particularly from sovereign governments.
The firm raised its price target on the chipmaker to $190 per share, implying a roughly 15% upside from Nvidia's current trading levels. Citi analysts said they see Nvidia capturing a larger piece of an expanding total addressable market (TAM) for data center infrastructure. The upgrade comes as Nvidia continues its charge toward a $4 trillion market cap, with shares up 12% in the past month.
"We believe sovereign demand is already contributing up to billions of dollars in 2025" and should ramp up further in 2026, analysts Atif Malik and Papa Sylla wrote. Nvidia is involved in "essentially every sovereign deal," the note said, making the company central to the global race to build national AI infrastructure.
The firm raised its 2028 AI compute TAM estimate to $563 billion, up 13% from $500 billion, and networking TAM to $119 billion, up from $90 billion, expecting sharp sales increases for Nvidia.
Citi noted that at Nvidia's recent Generative AI conference, participants discussed a possible benchmark for AI infrastructure: one supercomputer or 10,000 GPUs per 100,000 employees, a ratio that could drive massive enterprise and government buildouts.
Nvidia, whose Blackwell GB200 chips power many of these AI clusters, is already seeing accelerating deployment, according to Citi. Concerns about potential bottlenecks in Nvidia's supply chain have also eased, with Citi reporting that rack buildouts are happening "at a rapid pace." As the company prepares for its next-gen GB300 chips, analysts expect a smooth transition, crediting lessons learned from earlier platform shifts.
Citi now expects Nvidia's data center revenue to grow 5% in FY 2027 and 11% in FY 2028. Networking sales are projected to surge by 12% and 27%, respectively. This represents a 20% attach rate, indicating a rising demand for high-performance systems that link large AI clusters. Gross margins are also forecast to continue expanding, normalizing in the mid-70% range by year-end.
Still, the bank flagged downside risks, including renewed export restrictions under a potential second Trump administration. Bloomberg recently reported that Malaysia and Thailand could face scrutiny for suspected shipments to China.
For now, though, the AI gold rush — especially from public sector buyers — shows no signs of slowing.
"Nvidia has line of sight to tens of gigawatts of sovereign and enterprise AI factory buildouts over the next few years," Malik and Sylla wrote.
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