On August 4, Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) opened up commercial use of Alpamayo 2 Super, a reasoning model built for robotaxis and self-driving cars. The move signals where the company wants its next growth chapter to come from, even as investors argue over what its core chip business is worth today.
Bull Case: A Foundation Model Built To Be Licensed
Alpamayo 2 Super is the newest entry in what Nvidia calls the most downloaded family of open reasoning models for autonomous driving on Hugging Face, with the lineup topping 500,000 downloads. It ships under OpenMDW 1.1, the Linux Foundation’s open license, which lets automakers and suppliers fine-tune and sell products built on it without asking Nvidia for extra permission. That turns a research release into a business: developers can build proprietary self-driving stacks on Nvidia’s foundation without paying frontier-model prices for every task. On the LingoQA driving benchmark, Nvidia says the model beat Gemini 2.5 Pro by 15.1 points and GPT-4o by 23.2 points, and it can output a full driving trajectory alongside a plain-language explanation of its reasoning, a feature built for safety reviewers as much as for a leaderboard.
That expansion sits on top of a business already growing faster than its size would suggest. Trailing 12-month revenue climbed 71% to $253 billion, and the pace has been accelerating rather than cooling, moving from 56% growth a year ago to 85% in the most recent quarter. Data center revenue, the business autonomous-vehicle compute rides on, rose 92% year over year to $75.2 billion, and Nvidia raised its quarterly dividend from a penny to $0.25 a share while authorizing an $80 billion buyback. Demand from its biggest customers backs that up: Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) raised its 2026 capital spending guidance toward $195 billion to $205 billion, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) lifted its own estimate toward $220 billion, and SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) CEO Elon Musk said his company is “exclusive to Nvidia” for its next computing architecture.
Bear Case: A Price Tag The Market Refuses To Get Excited About
The market’s response to all that growth has cooled. Nvidia’s stock has fallen or barely moved after each of its last several earnings reports, even on beats, and it reports fiscal second-quarter results again on August 26. Some of the caution is arithmetic. Nvidia’s market capitalization has reached roughly $5 trillion, about a sixth of annual US economic output, a size that makes the kind of percentage gains that built early fortunes in the stock difficult to repeat.
Growth is also expected to decelerate, from an 82% pace this fiscal year to about 43% the next, and views on the multiple differ, from around 21x forward earnings to a P/E near 32. That gap is the real tension: a price built for a fairly ordinary company sits on top of a business still compounding at an extraordinary rate. If that compounding slows further, or AI infrastructure spending pauses, a stock priced mostly on next year’s earnings could take a hard hit, especially with some of Nvidia’s largest customers already designing their own chips.
What The Positioning Data Shows
Hedge fund ownership rose from 264 to 275 funds in the most recent quarter, which points to building rather than fading institutional interest. Short interest sits at just 1.39% of the float, thin enough that organized bets against the stock remain rare. Nvidia’s forward price-to-earnings ratio comes in at 22.88, noticeably below the 32 multiple one estimate above attaches to the stock and closer to the roughly 21x figure another calculates, a reminder that how “expensive” Nvidia looks depends heavily on which earnings base gets used.
Where The Argument Goes From Here
Alpamayo 2 Super is a small piece of Nvidia’s business today, but it points to how the company wants to extend its reach beyond chip sales into the software that runs on top of them. The core financial picture already shows growth accelerating even as the market treats earnings day with a shrug. That gap only closes if hyperscaler spending and new categories like autonomous driving keep compounding at their current pace, something a slowdown toward the more ordinary growth rates already priced in would undo. Nvidia’s size means the next round of gains will look nothing like the ones that built its history.
While we acknowledge the risk and potential of NVDA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVDA and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
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