Nvidia is the most important tech company on planet: analyst – Yahoo Finance

Step aside Apple and Google, Nvidia may be the new king of tech, one analyst contends.

"Nvidia may be the most important technology company today," said Evercore ISI analyst C.J. Muse in a new note on Monday. The analyst reiterated an Outperform rating on Nvidia with a $375 price target.

Shares of Nvidia rose slightly in afternoon trading Monday to $277.

Muse's upbeat take on Nvidia comes hot on the heels of the company's closely watched GTC conference, where it held nearly 1,000 sessions that included more than 1,600 speakers.

"Beyond having best-in class hardware accelerator solutions with its GPUs, Nvidia is broadening its portfolio and deepening its expertise across DPUs and CPUs, along with other areas such as connectivity and interconnects to put all of the pieces together. Then to ensure these complex solutions run seamlessly, Nvidia is continuing to pioneer software both at the foundational level and application specific level which is key to the companys TAM [total addressable market] expansion and the overall democratization of AI. Events like GTC hammer these point home, with various customers and ecosystem partners highlighting the advancements they are driving along with NVDA, and clear roadmaps for continued growth for the next decade plus," Muse explained.

One area Nvidia is doubling down on is its autonomous driving platform.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JANUARY 08: Cameras are visible on the exterior of an Nvidia self-driving car inside the Nvidia booth during CES 2019 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 8, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the world's largest annual consumer technology trade show, runs through January 11 and features about 4,500 exhibitors showing off their latest products and services to more than 180,000 attendees. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

At Nvidia's conference last week, CEO Jensen Huang touted the companys $11 billion vehicle-tech order pipeline over the next six years.

Automotive will surely be our next multibillion-dollar business, Huang told Julie Hyman and Dan Howley in a Yahoo Finance Presents interview. The $11 billion is going to be quite a significant business for us just in the car. But if you look at the totality of AV, I think this is going to be one of the largest AI industries in the world.

During the conference, Nvidia put the potential market for auto-related software, hardware and data-center services at $300 billion.

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Points out Evercore ISI's Muse, "Advancements across in vehicle technologies, data center capabilities, connectivity, and AI/simulation (Omniverse) are enabling a transformation in the automotive industry today, leading to an estimated $2 trillion opportunity from the monetization of car services over the coming decade (largely led by Autonomous Driving and/or Mobility-as-a-Service)."

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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Nvidia is the most important tech company on planet: analyst - Yahoo Finance