Silicon Valley entered the "NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) Time"! Can the GTC conference once again lead the semiconductor sector to "take off"?

If history repeats itself, NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US)s upcoming GTC 2026 conference could be another catalyst for the stock. Notably, Wells Fargo & Company analysts led by Aaron Rakers stated: "We are buyers of NVIDIA Corporation ahead of this event. While history certainly doesn't simply repeat itself, we want to highlight that NVIDIA Corporation stock has performed very strongly after GTC in the past few years (NVIDIA Corporation's performance exceeded the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index by over 30% in the three months following GTC)." Investors in the tech sector will undoubtedly focus on this conference, which will take place in San Jose, California from March 16th to 19th. According to the company's information, OpenAI, Alphabet Inc. Class C DeepMind (GOOGL.US), Meta (META.US), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US), and Tesla, Inc. (TSLA.US) will all participate in main stage or keynote sessions. NVIDIA Corporation CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote speech on Monday, March 16th at 2pm Eastern Time. Additionally, Huang will moderate an industry panel discussion on Wednesday afternoon at 3:30pm Eastern Time. GF Securities believes that this event may not only be a catalyst for NVIDIA Corporation, but also for the entire semiconductor sector. It is expected that NVIDIA Corporation will showcase its second-generation Co-packaged Optics (CPO) switch. The company's analysts suggest that this may adopt Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR (TSM)'s co-packaged optics technology, but volume is not expected to expand until 2027, reaching 80,000 units by then. Other potential announcements include updates to its Feynman series GPUs - the Kyber NVL576 series rack. Bank of America Merrill Lynch also has a strong bullish stance on NVIDIA Corporation ahead of the conference, reiterating a "buy" rating and a $300 price target. Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya stated: "While we do not expect official sales outlook for 2027-28, any details on Rubin series production (through 2027-28) could help boost the currently depressed stock price (currently trading at a forward P/E multiple of 17, at historic lows), following the strong production of the Blackwell series that already delivered sales exceeding $500 billion." Wells Fargo & Company expects NVIDIA Corporation to provide updates on its product pipeline. Rakers stated: "Pipeline expansion of over $500 billion + elongation + more background disclosed by NVIDIA Corporation, namely the deployment of over 9 GW of Blackwell (compared to under 4.5 GW of Hopper). Since the end of 2024, when Blackwell started shipping, we estimate that NVIDIA Corporation has confirmed around $240-250 billion in revenue towards the target of over $500 billion (till 2026). We believe it would be a positive if the target is raised to over $600 billion. We also look to see if NVIDIA Corporation will update its forecast of AI infrastructure annual spending reaching $3-4 trillion by 2030." Stocks that may be impacted by developments at GTC include: AMD (AMD.US), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, Broadcom Inc. (AVGO.US), Intel Corporation (INTC.US), Marvell (MRVL.US), and various networking companies.