Blackwell Gains Ground: Will It Be NVIDIA's Next Growth Catalyst?

NVIDIA’s NVDA new Blackwell architecture is playing a major role in its latest growth. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, Blackwell-powered products made up nearly 70% of NVIDIA’s Data Center compute revenues, the segment that jumped 73% year over year to $39 billion. This marks a major shift in the company’s product cycle and points to strong demand for its newest platform.

Blackwell is built for heavy AI tasks like training, reasoning models and running AI agents. The company’s GB200 NVL system, based on Blackwell, is already in full use by major players like Microsoft, Google and OpenAI.

Beyond big cloud companies, Blackwell is helping build sovereign AI infrastructure in places like Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and the European Union. NVIDIA expects hundreds of AI factories to emerge globally, powered by its chips.

NVIDIA claims that its GB200 NVL72 racks can deliver 30 times faster inference than previous systems. This performance boost, along with easy integration using CUDA and NeMo software, is driving adoption.

Despite China-related export headwinds, Blackwell’s momentum across sovereign, enterprise and hyperscale customers positions it as NVIDIA’s most impactful platform yet. If adoption keeps pace, Blackwell could drive not just Data Center growth but also lift NVIDIA’s dominance in AI chips to the next level.

Competitors Challenging NVIDIA’s Blackwell Dominance

Two key rivals — Advanced Micro Devices AMD and Intel INTC — are attempting to challenge Blackwell’s dominance.

Advanced Micro Devices, with its Instinct MI300X platform, is gaining traction in training workloads and offers a competitive performance-per-dollar proposition. The product has witnessed some adoption from hyperscalers, including Microsoft and Meta. The larger memory size of Advanced Micro Devices’ Instinct MI300X platform is a plus, but it lacks the software tools and developer base that NVIDIA offers.

Meanwhile, Intel’s Gaudi 3 chips aim to provide a cheaper, open alternative. While promising on paper, Intel’s track record with execution and ecosystem support remains a concern.

While both competitors offer promising hardware, NVIDIA’s deep integration of hardware, networking and AI software continues to give Blackwell a significant competitive advantage in the race for AI infrastructure leadership.

NVIDIA’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of NVIDIA have risen around 5.7% year to date against the Zacks Semiconductor – General industry’s growth of 5.3%.

From a valuation standpoint, NVDA trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 30.5, slightly below the industry’s average of 32.77.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NVIDIA’s fiscal 2026 and 2027 earnings implies a year-over-year increase of approximately 42% and 32%, respectively. The estimates for fiscal 2026 have been revised downward, while for fiscal 2027, it has been revised upward in the past seven days.

NVIDIA currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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