BofA’s Vivek Arya Sees Nvidia at $350 as Agentic AI Drives an “Unprecedented” Chip Cycle

Bank of America’s Vivek Arya walked onto CNBC with a number that sits well above consensus. His price target on NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) is $350, against a stock trading around $215.

Arya is making a longer call, and this might lead to other analysts also revising their estimates upwards in the coming days and weeks.

From chatbots to agents, and why the compute curve bends

Arya’s setup: “What we are seeing is kind of this unprecedented wave of demand for semiconductors because of generative AI. What was simply chat bots have now moved to the next stage, which is agentic applications. These are multi-step autonomous applications.”

A chatbot answers a question once. An agent decomposes a task, calls tools, retries, reasons across steps, and runs in the background. Each step consumes tokens, and tokens consume GPUs.

Jensen Huang made the same case on the most recent earnings call, telling investors “Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value and scaling rapidly across companies and industries” and describing the data center buildout as “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.”

The capex-to-growth correlation

Arya’s second observation should make CFOs uncomfortable about underspending. “The more you have invested in your computing infrastructure, the faster you’re growing. You see that kind of straight line correlation.” If true, capex restraint…