What happened
Up again, down again semiconductor stock Nvidia (NVDA 1.64%) is up again as of noon ET Tuesday, rising a solid 2%. Why?
I see a couple of possible reasons.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
Reason No. 1 is Bank of America. The American megabank named Nvidia stock its "top pick in semis for 2022," as StreetInsider.com reported yesterday.
According to BofA, investors in Nvidia can anticipate sales growth of between 25% and 30% this year -- well above the 19% growth that the rest of Wall Street is predicting. And a revenue beat of this magnitude, argues the analyst, could drive Nvidia stock as high as $375 by the end of this year -- a gain of nearly $100 per share.
Reason No. 2, meanwhile, comes from Nvidia itself. Nvidia has been trying for more than a year to buy out its rival semiconductor maker Arm Holdings. At this point, regulatory opposition to the merger is so great that most investors assume it's a lost cause -- that Nvidia will not be allowed to acquire Arm.
Now what
Nvidia begs to differ, however.
As TomsHardware.com reports this morning, over in England Nvidia is still fighting the good fight and arguing to the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that there's little overlap between Nvidia's existing business and Arm's, that in any case, Nvidia is quite "willing to commit to certain important legal obligations to get this acquisition fully approved," and that the CMA should approve the merger after all. And bolstering Nvidia's argument, Arm's own CEO pleads with his home country government to permit the merger in order to help Arm "invest, expand, move fast and innovate" with help from Nvidia.
One thing both companies agree on, reports TomsHardware: The longer the CMA drags out this decision, the more Nvidia's and Arm's rivals such as Intel and Apple and Qualcomm will take advantage of the situation, "forging ahead while Arm lives in an uncertain, underinvested land of uncertainty."
Nvidia investors today are hoping the CMA will take that argument to heart, and decide whether Nvidia gets to buy Arm once and for all -- and quickly.
