Is This Giant Tech Stock the Best Way to Invest in the Metaverse?

Not only does Nvidia (NVDA 3.46%) offer exposure to the massive potential gains of the metaverse, but it is also already a leader in the gaming market, data centers, and cloud computing. In this segment from "The Virtual Opportunities Show," recorded on Feb. 1, Motley Fool contributor Danny Vena discusses how Nvidia investors can play all of those secular tailwinds in addition to the metaverse. 

Danny Vena: The stock that I want to talk about is one that is familiar to Foolish investors and that's NVIDIA. NVIDIA, ticker NVDA. NVIDIA is the leader in discrete desktop GPU market. Anybody that is a serious gamer probably has an NVIDIA chip in their system. They are the leader with something like 80 plus percent, 83 percent of the GPU market. That is where NVIDIA gets the majority of its revenue right now, but that equation is changing. Right now NVIDIA is getting a much larger growing part of its revenue stream is coming from data centers and Cloud computing.

One of the things that I think is pretty interesting about NVIDIA is CEO Jensen Huang's ability to pivot on a dime and essentially adjust the technology to meet whatever the changing demand is. I just wanted to share here for just a moment. This is from NVIDIA's most recent quarterly earnings transcript. They didn't mention the metaverse, not once. The term Omniverse came up 43 times. NVIDIA is taking the approach that there's not going to be one metaverse, but there's going to be multitude of Omniverses out there and that they are like Asit said earlier, that there are going to be a number of smaller metaverse environments throughout. They're trying to basically get behind business right now and say we have the tools that you need to create your Omniverse.

This one paragraph I thought here was pretty intriguing. Last week we announced the general ability of the Omniverse enterprise, a platform for simulating physically accurate 3D world and digital twins. The initial market reception has been incredible. Professionals at over 700 companies are evaluating the platform, names a bunch of companies. More than 70,000 individual creators have downloaded the Omniverse enterprise platform since the Open Beta launch in December. This shows you and one of the things that I have been arguing is we really don't know how the metaverse is going to flesh out, digitally speaking, of course. I think the way to invest in the metaverse is by a great picks and shovels play which is what NVIDIA is.

Now, I also want to briefly share what to expect in NVIDIA's upcoming quarter here. The company shared its outlook and essentially said they expect revenue of about 7.4 billion. Their GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are going to expand a little bit. What I wanted to do is I also have a spreadsheet that I have been keeping for quite some time. I'm just going to share that spreadsheet here briefly. That 7.4 billion, which is actually what analysts' consensus estimates are matched by NVIDIA's forecast exactly would represent growth of about 48 percent year-over-year. Now, if you look at just a slight slowdown from the fiscal third-quarter, which they finished up and they reported in early November before the tech downturn started. Also it's a slowdown from the fourth-quarter growth of last year, which was about 61 percent.

Now that's not surprising, NVIDIA has historically been conservative with their guidance. I would not be surprised to see that actually come in a little bit higher. But I think the important thing about NVIDIA is not only do you get exposure to the potential that the metaverse offers, but you also have NVIDIA is already doing quite well in the gaming market, in data centers, in Cloud computing. They've got their platform setup for professional visualization and in self-driving car market. I think this is a really good way to play all of those secular tailwinds and also gets you a little bit exposure to the metaverse.