NVIDIA executives cash out over $700 million, but can't stop the "most important stock on Earth" from soaring bullishly

According to the Zhitong Finance and Economics APP, while NVIDIA (NVDA.US), the AI chip leader and dubbed as "the most important stock on Earth" by Goldman Sachs, has repeatedly hit historical highs, the pressure of large-scale insider selling faced by NVIDIA's stock price is intensifying. Statistics show that insiders at NVIDIA have sold stocks worth over $700 million this year. Despite facing intense selling pressure after the May earnings announcement, due to the explosive growth in global demand for the company's AI chips, NVIDIA's stock price continues to climb on top of its record high levels, and the bullish trend of NVIDIA's stock price may be far from over.

According to data compiled by Washington Service, up to now this year, NVIDIA executives and board members have sold approximately 770,000 shares of NVIDIA stock, worth over $700 million, not including the impact of the stock split on June 10 at a ratio of 1 to 10. According to the latest data from Washington Service, this is the largest scale of selling since the first half of 2023, based on a semi-annual basis, when about 848,000 shares were sold.

Considering the astonishing 164% increase in the stock since 2024, the dollar value of stock sales this year surpasses the scale of previous insider selling periods. The global AI arms race, where companies are striving to increase the overall computing power of AI systems, is crucial for driving efficient tools like ChatGPT, which has gained popularity worldwide. This has significantly boosted the demand for data center server AI accelerator chips (represented by NVIDIA AI GPUs) and NVIDIA undoubtedly dominates the server AI chip market, holding a market share of 90%.

In late May, NVIDIA, the AI chip leader, once again announced unparalleled performance that shocked global investors, dispelling concerns about a slowdown in spending by AI-related companies. NVIDIA once again strengthened the "AI faith" of tech investors single-handedly, driving the continuous rise of US tech stocks in recent days and also fueling a new round of crazy price surges for NVIDIA's stock.

NVIDIA's Q1 total revenue increased by 262% year-on-year to $26 billion, setting a historical high, with total revenue growth exceeding 200% year-on-year for the third consecutive quarter. With strong demand for H100/H200 GPUs, NVIDIA's Q1 data center revenue surged by 427% year-on-year to $22.6 billion, also reaching a historical high

NVIDIA Insider "Sell-off Storm" Sweeps In

Mark Lehmann, CEO of Citizens JMP Securities, believes that the large-scale sell-off by insiders is indeed worth paying attention to, but considering that some executives are compensated in the form of stocks, and there seems to be no sign of any slowdown in global demand for the company's high-performance AI GPU products, this may not necessarily cause market panic.

NVIDIA's insider stock reduction scale since 2022, based on a semi-annual basis

Lehmann stated in an interview: "Whenever you see this kind of wealth effect and this scale of market value being created, I'm always looking for who's coming and going, I haven't seen a lot of executives who helped us achieve this market value selling off their holdings." "That would be more concerning."

The chip giant is currently the world's third most valuable listed company, with a market value of about $3.22 trillion, just behind US tech giants Microsoft (MSFT.US) and Apple (AAPL.US), and the gap between the three is very small. Recently, Apple and Microsoft have often alternated in leading the total market value scale, taking turns enjoying the title of "the world's highest market value listed company."

Statistics show that more than one-third of NVIDIA insiders chose to sell stocks after NVIDIA released another unparalleled performance report on May 22 this year, when NVIDIA also announced an upcoming stock split, these positive factors led to another crazy surge in the company's stock price. During this period, the largest scale of selling contribution came from NVIDIA board members Mark Stevens and Tench Cox.

On Monday Eastern Time, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, known as the "AI Father," reported that, according to a pre-arranged trading plan, he sold stocks worth about $31 million. A NVIDIA representative declined to comment.

While there are many sellers among insiders, there has been a lack of buying power from within. According to statistics compiled by Washington Service, apart from exercising significant options, NVIDIA has not had any insiders buying stocks since NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress bought a large amount of stocks in December 2020 As NVIDIA executives and directors have been heavily selling off their shares, the stocks of U.S. tech companies closely related to artificial intelligence also show signs of overheating. On Monday, major tech giants such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, as well as leading players in Ethernet switching chips and ASIC chips like Broadcom (AVGO.US) saw further increases in their stock prices, driving the Nasdaq 100 index to hit a new all-time high.

However, the 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) of the Nasdaq 100 index, which covers many popular tech stocks, is currently at its "highest overbought level" since 2018, indicating that the index may experience a sharp pullback at any time.

From a long-term perspective, the rise of "the most important stock on Earth" may be far from over

Beth Kindig, a technology industry analyst from the well-known investment firm I/O Fund, recently released a research report stating that by 2030, NVIDIA's stock price is expected to soar by about 258% from current levels, with a market capitalization potentially reaching $10 trillion (NVIDIA's current market cap is about $2.97 trillion). The main logic behind this projection lies in the incredibly strong moat brought by NVIDIA's "CUDA+AI GPU" ecosystem, and the potential huge revenue contribution from NVIDIA's next-generation AI GPU based on the Blackwell architecture.

NVIDIA has been deeply involved in the global high-performance computing field for many years, especially with its CUDA computing platform, which it single-handedly created and has become popular worldwide. The CUDA computing platform is an exclusive parallel computing acceleration platform and programming assistance software developed by NVIDIA, allowing software developers and engineers to use NVIDIA GPUs for parallel general-purpose computing (only compatible with NVIDIA GPUs, not compatible with mainstream GPUs like AMD and Intel).

CUDA is a platform that ChatGPT and other generative AI applications heavily rely on, and its importance is on par with hardware systems, crucial for the development and deployment of large AI models. With its high level of technical maturity, absolute performance optimization advantages, and extensive ecosystem support, CUDA has become the most commonly used and widely adopted collaborative platform in AI research and commercial deployment.

NVIDIA's hottest AI chips currently, the H100/H200 GPU accelerators, are based on NVIDIA's groundbreaking Hopper GPU architecture, providing even more powerful computing capabilities compared to previous generations, especially in floating-point operations, tensor core performance, and AI-specific acceleration. What's even more significant is that the AI GPU based on the Blackwell architecture outperforms the Hopper architecture in all aspects, particularly in the GPT-3 LLM benchmark with 1.75 trillion parameters The inference performance of the GB200 architecture by Blackwell is 7 times that of the H100 system, and it provides training speeds 4 times faster than the H100 system.

Regarding the deployment of the new Blackwell architecture AI GPU in major data centers in March, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that the brand-new Blackwell architecture AI GPU products will be shipped in the second quarter of this year, ramped up in the third quarter, and officially deployed in data centers in the fourth quarter. It is expected that "significant revenue growth from Blackwell architecture chips" will be seen this year. In the March press release of NVIDIA's new Blackwell architecture AI GPU, Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly praised NVIDIA's AI hardware as the "best AI hardware."

Analyst Jin Di predicts that by the end of NVIDIA's 2026 fiscal year, the revenue brought in by the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture AI GPU will significantly surpass its predecessor architecture GPU - the H100. It is expected that by then, the Blackwell architecture will drive NVIDIA to achieve data center revenue of up to $200 billion.

On Wall Street, bullish voices on NVIDIA's stock price are incessant. Bank of America points out that although NVIDIA's stock price has repeatedly hit historical highs recently, there is still huge upside potential because this chip company is expected to continue to dominate the AI chip market in the coming years. In a report released on June 5th (Wednesday), the bank reiterated its "buy" rating on NVIDIA's stock and stated that the company led by Jensen Huang remains the top choice in the IT industry. The bank's strategist set a target price of up to $150 for NVIDIA within the next 12 months (NVIDIA's stock price closed at $130.98 on Monday).

In a recent report by Susquehanna, NVIDIA's target stock price was raised from $145 to $160. The institution stated in the report: "Although our valuation is significantly higher than the industry average of about 28.5x, we believe it is reasonable because NVIDIA can seize major opportunities in the thriving AI terminal market."

Well-known Wall Street institution Rosenblatt significantly raised NVIDIA's target stock price from $140 to $200, maintaining a "buy" rating. This target price of up to $200 is the highest 12-month target stock price on Wall Street. In addition, Barclays raised NVIDIA's target stock price from $120 to $145, and Argus Research raised NVIDIA's target stock price from $110 to $150