Is Nvidia the Next Apple?

The market is making a subtle but important regime shift: NVDA is moving from a scarcity multiple to a utility multiple, and that transition usually happens before fundamentals visibly crack. The buyback authorization matters less as a support bid than as a signal that management sees the stock as trading below intrinsic value; in practice, that often shortens drawdowns but does not re-ignite multiple expansion unless a new demand wave emerges. The key second-order effect is that capital is starting to rotate from pure GPU beta into adjacent picks-and-shovels beneficiaries with less headline risk and more duration on earnings.

The most interesting implication is competitive spillover. If NVDA broadens into networking, CPUs, opticals, and autonomous systems, the beneficiaries are not just direct partners like COHR, LITE, and INTC; the real winners may be supply-chain enablers with lower valuation sensitivity and less consensus ownership. That creates a more fragmented AI trade: core NVDA can consolidate while the ecosystem continues to compound, which is typically bullish for AVGO/TSM-style leverage to infrastructure spend, but also increases the odds of disappointment in names whose economics depend on a single NVDA-led cycle.

Risk-wise, the near-term catalyst window is 1-3 quarters, not days: any reacceleration in data center orders or evidence that new revenue vectors are inflecting would re-open the multiple. The main downside is that buybacks can mask decelerating growth for a while; if EPS holds up but revenue breadth stalls, the stock can drift sideways even as operating performance remains strong. The contrarian view is that the market may be underestimating how early this ecosystem is—NVDA’s optionality is still under-monetized, so calling it a mature Apple analog may be premature by several years, not months.