Why Nvidia stock is up around 2% ahead of GTC

Shares of Nvidia moved higher Monday as broader US equity markets rebounded and oil prices pulled back following a volatile week dominated by geopolitical tensions.

Nvidia stock was up about 2% during the session.

The gains came as US stocks advanced, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 348 points, or 0.8%.

The S&P 500 climbed 0.9%, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.1%.

Markets were attempting to recover from a losing week as investors continued monitoring developments related to the war involving Iran.

Oil prices pulled back during the session, helping support risk appetite across equities.

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Foxconn signals continued AI server demand

Sentiment toward Nvidia also received support from comments by one of its key partners, Hon Hai Precision Industry, widely known as Foxconn.

Foxconn Chairman Young Liu said the company expects strong growth in its artificial intelligence server business in 2026.

The remarks came during a post-earnings call with analysts following the company’s fourth-quarter results.

Foxconn reported net income of NT$45.2 billion ($1.4 billion) for the quarter ended December, below the average analyst estimate of NT$59.9 billion.

Despite the earnings miss, Foxconn had earlier reported revenue growth of 22% for the quarter, exceeding market expectations.

Investors turn to GTC Conference

Attention is now turning to Nvidia’s annual developer event, Nvidia GTC, which begins Monday and runs for four days.

The conference comes after a period of subdued trading in Nvidia’s shares.

Following a surge of more than 800% between the end of 2022 and 2024, the stock has largely traded sideways for about six months.

Even a strong earnings report last month failed to excite investors, with the shares dropping 5.5% the day after the results were released.

Nvidia shares ended last week around $180.25, roughly the same level as early August.

Over the same period, the Nasdaq-100 Index has risen about 5.1%.

The stock also remains about 11% below its closing record reached in October.

Huang keynote in focus

Investors are expected to closely watch the keynote presentation from Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, scheduled for Monday morning in San Jose, California.

The keynote will be followed by an analyst question-and-answer session on Tuesday.

While analysts do not expect a major surprise from the conference, they anticipate incremental updates on Nvidia’s long-term revenue outlook and its roadmap for future data centre chips.

Last year, Nvidia projected that sales tied to its data centre business could reach approximately $500 billion annually by the end of 2026.

In January, the company indicated that the outlook for those revenues had improved.

Shift toward AI inference

Another key theme expected at the conference is the growing importance of artificial intelligence inference workloads.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, have been central to training large AI models, allowing the company to dominate the market for AI accelerators used in building large-scale data centres.

However, as AI systems mature, demand is increasingly shifting toward inference.

Inference workloads often require different types of chips and computing architectures than those optimised purely for training.

This shift could intensify competition for Nvidia as major technology companies such as Alphabet, along with customers like OpenAI and Meta Platforms, work to develop their own custom AI processors.