Nvidia executives and insiders sell stock amid reported delays to Blackwell GPU launch.
Market sentiment has been positive following strong bank earnings and increasing hopes of a soft landing. Ryan Detrick, Carson Group chief market strategist, expressed optimism about the current bull market during a CNBC appearance, stating: "This is a bull market. Now we're in the third year of a bull market. My friend Sam Stovall said once you get to 65 years old, the odds of getting to 85 are really, really high. Bull markets work that way. Going back 50 years, there's five other bull markets that made it into their third year, like this one is right now. The worst any of them went was another three years. A five-year total. The average was eight years. I'm not saying we have another six years of a bull market but what we're saying is this is an economy that keeps surprising to the upside." However, Detrick characterized large-cap tech stocks as "pricey," while viewing small- and mid-cap stocks as cheap and describing financials and industrials as fairly valued.
Despite this optimistic backdrop, Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) has experienced notable insider selling activity. On September 6, 2024, Nvidia President and CEO Jen Hsun Huang sold 240,000 shares at $104.35 per share, valued at approximately $25 million, with no significant change to his ownership of 861,499,236 shares. On September 19, 2024, Director Tench Coxe sold 2 million shares at $117.87 per share, reducing his ownership by 5% to 34,578,208 shares, in a transaction valued at approximately $235.7 million. The stock is up 16% since that sale. On September 24, 2024, Director Mark A. Stevens sold 165,100 shares at $121.27 per share, valued at approximately $20 million, with no significant change to his ownership of 38,592,685 shares.
Nvidia's stock declined following Q2 results amid Blackwell delay reports that were confirmed by management, though analysts note the delays were primarily due to a change in the Blackwell GPU mask that does not affect the main functional logic or design of the chip, and do not alter the core growth thesis for the company. The company is positioned to benefit significantly from the data center boom driven by the AI wave. At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in March 2024, CEO Jensen Huang estimated annual spending on data center infrastructure at about $250 billion, with potential total spending over the next decade of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. Bank of America's Vivek Arya echoed this estimate during the same Q&A session, suggesting the total addressable market would fall in the $1-2 trillion range as countries invest in their own AI infrastructure.
Nvidia faces competitive pressures from AMD and internally developed AI accelerators from Google, Amazon, and Apple, yet analysts project Nvidia's data center market share between 2025 and 2029 could exceed $950 billion—less than half of the total market, but sufficient to maintain sector leadership. Vltava Fund highlighted in its Q3 2024 investor letter that "The first-tier beneficiaries are primarily companies in the semiconductor sector, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) perhaps the most. That company is benefiting from the huge increase in investment by large technology companies to build enormous data centres. We know who NVIDIA's customers are. They are companies like Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. They are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into their AI capabilities." However, the fund noted that it remains unclear who will be the customers of NVIDIA's customers and when demand for AI services will justify the enormous investments being made, with the certainty only that AI capability investments are ongoing and huge, driving demand not only to chipmakers and the semiconductor sector but to construction of new semiconductor factories and energy sources.