Analysts at several major brokerages adjusted ratings and targets this week for companies tied closely to the artificial intelligence investment cycle. Their notes emphasize product ramps, data center capacity dynamics, memory pricing and the emergence of agentic commerce as drivers for revenue and margin trajectories across semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, hardware and commerce platforms.
Nvidia - Citi maintains Buy, sees 2H26 outperformance
Citi reiterated a Buy rating on Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), keeping a $270 price target while urging investors to add to positions ahead of what the firm expects will be a period of share outperformance in the second half of 2026. Analyst Atif Malik laid out a near-term revenue outlook that sits above consensus: he expects the January-quarter to produce $67 billion in revenue compared with the Street at $65.6 billion, and he models guidance to an April quarter of $73 billion against a consensus of $71.6 billion.
The bullish case Citi presents is anchored to product-cycle momentum. Malik anticipates the continued ramp of the B300 and the Rubin platform will support a 34% half-over-half acceleration in calendar second-half 2026 sales, versus a 27% acceleration in the first half of the year. That step-up in the company’s modeled cadence is a central rationale for Citi’s expectation that Nvidia will outperform peers later in the year.
Citi also highlighted the market’s focus shifting away from single-quarter results and toward Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in mid-March. The note said the event is expected to provide detailed commentary on the company’s inference roadmap, driven in part by Groq’s low-latency SRAM IP, and to give an early outlook for AI sales in 2026 and 2027. That framing suggests Citi views the conference as a potential informational catalyst for visibility into the company’s product timing and revenue trajectory.
On profitability, Malik models fiscal 2027 gross margin near 75% and assumes operating expense growth in the high-30% range, roughly consistent with trends seen in fiscal 2026. The analyst addressed concerns about elevated hyperscaler capital spending by framing those investments as delivering long-term returns through continued cloud-revenue growth driven by AI infrastructure demand. While he acknowledged rising competition in inference, Citi expects Nvidia to remain the leader across both training and inference-focused workloads.
In sum, Citi kept its Buy rating and $270 target, concluding that the stock looks attractive with the potential to outperform in the second half of 2026 as demand visibility extends into 2027.
Amazon - Morgan Stanley names AMZN Top Pick on AWS durability and agentic commerce
Morgan Stanley elevated Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) as its Top Pick, arguing that both AWS and Retail businesses are underappreciated beneficiaries of generative AI and are positioned to capture the next phase of AI-led disruption. Analyst Brian Nowak said he remains constructive despite uncertainty around returns from significant AI capital spending.
Nowak outlined two primary catalysts that could re-rate the shares. First, he pointed to the durability of AWS growth. He described demand trends as robust and said backlog levels support 30%-plus growth "for quite some time," while noting that the current pace of acceleration is constrained by the pace at which new data center capacity comes online. To quantify returns from infrastructure investment, Nowak applies a capex yield framework - measuring incremental revenue relative to prior-year capital spending. In his base case, the implied yield sits about 50% below the long-term average, implying upside if data center openings begin to catch up with prior investment.
Nowak added specificity to that construct: every 5% improvement in the capex yield would contribute roughly 130 basis points to AWS growth, and a movement toward an implied yield of about $0.45 could push year-over-year AWS growth into the mid-30% range. He expects yield to improve as AWS brings more data center capacity online, allowing the business to accelerate.
The second catalyst is the rise of agentic commerce. Nowak argued Amazon’s expanding last-mile inventory, growing logistics infrastructure and ongoing technology investments position the company to lead both vertical and horizontal agentic shopping initiatives. He cited Amazon’s platform-specific agent Rufus as already contributing approximately 140 basis points to fourth-quarter 2025 gross merchandise value growth. Morgan Stanley noted that Amazon has acknowledged a need to improve customer experiences with horizontal AI agents and that there are ongoing conversations about partnerships to address this. The brokerage believes horizontal agentic partnerships could emerge, strengthening investor confidence in Amazon’s long-term positioning.
Dell Technologies - Evercore adds to Tactical Outperform ahead of January-quarter results
Evercore placed Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL) on its Tactical Outperform list ahead of the company’s January-quarter earnings, arguing the hardware maker is well positioned to beat current revenue and earnings expectations. The firm expects Dell to exceed consensus revenue of $31.4 billion and consensus EPS of $3.52, driven by strong near-term demand across traditional hardware categories - PCs and servers - as well as AI compute.
Evercore flagged memory pricing dynamics as a potential near-term tailwind. The brokerage believes Dell benefited from a demand pull-in across PCs and traditional servers as customers sought to get ahead of average selling price increases. Within Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, AI server demand remains central: the company exited its fiscal third quarter with AI orders of $12.3 billion and a backlog of $18.4 billion, and management previously guided to fiscal 2026 AI server revenue of $25 billion. Evercore interprets that guidance to imply a step-up to more than $9 billion in January-quarter AI revenue.
On the client side, early IDC data cited by Evercore indicates Dell gained about 100 basis points of market share in the fourth quarter, marking its first share gain in more than three years. Despite these positives, Evercore expects some near-term margin pressure. Consensus currently points to roughly a 90 basis-point sequential decline in gross margin to 20.2%, down 410 basis points year over year, which Evercore says partly reflects early memory headwinds.
To protect margins going forward, Evercore noted Dell has shifted to more dynamic pricing actions and a shorter quote window. Looking beyond the near term, the brokerage expects management to outline a path to at least high-single-digit revenue growth and low-to-mid-teens EPS growth into fiscal 2027, supported by gross profit dollar expansion, operating leverage and share repurchases. In AI servers specifically, Evercore forecasts a sizable step-up as Rubin ramps that could support $35 billion to $40 billion in revenue while maintaining stable mid-single-digit margins.
Evercore maintained its Outperform rating on Dell while lowering its price target to $160.
Analog Devices - Needham upgrades to Buy as demand and inventory dynamics improve
Needham & Company upgraded Analog Devices (NASDAQ:ADI) to Buy from Hold on Thursday, citing strengthening operating trends, solid recent results and improving demand across key end markets that the firm expects will continue to support earnings and the share price. Analyst N. Quinn Bolton said Needham could no longer justify remaining on the sidelines following fiscal first-quarter results that came in ahead of expectations and guidance that was "meaningfully above expectations."
The upgrade comes despite a notable run in the stock: shares have climbed more than 40% since Analog Devices’ fiscal fourth-quarter 2025 report, compared with a 2.6% gain for the S&P 500. Needham nonetheless believes additional upside remains and set a $400 price target, based on a 30-times multiple of its 2027 earnings estimate.
Bolton pointed to customer dynamics that suggest stabilization. He said customers appear to have moved through a digestion phase and that order patterns are now better aligned with underlying consumption. He highlighted recovery potential in the company’s core industrial segment: excluding automated test equipment and aerospace and defense, that business remains approximately 20% below prior peak levels, indicating room for improvement if bookings strengthen.
The analyst also flagged inventory dynamics as a potential tailwind, arguing a restocking cycle is still in front of the company. Improved pricing and growing exposure to data center and AI applications - which now account for roughly 20% of sales - were cited as structural supports for ADI’s growth outlook.
Shopify - Truist upgrades to Buy, cites AI-driven selloff as buying opportunity
Truist Securities raised Shopify (NASDAQ:SHOP) to Buy from Hold and increased its price target to $150 from $110, arguing that the recent software selloff tied to AI concerns created an attractive entry point for long-term investors. Analyst Terry Tillman described Shopify as one of the few software companies to show strong accelerating growth recently, and he listed multiple durable drivers - international expansion, payments, enterprise traction, B2B and agentic commerce - that could support one of the best profitable growth profiles at scale in software and agentic AI.
Tillman addressed investor worries around AI disruption and the concept of "vibe coding," where AI-driven, prompt-based no-code tools rapidly assemble applications with limited traditional programming. He judged those risks overstated and emphasized Shopify’s scale, security and performance characteristics. To illustrate the platform’s resiliency under heavy volume, the note highlighted that Shopify handled $5.1 million in sales per minute on Black Friday and processed 14.8 trillion database queries during Cyber Week.
The analyst said he does not expect Shopify to be materially affected by vibe coding via prompt engineering or no-code AI startups in the foreseeable future. Payments also remain a central pillar of Truist’s bullish case. Gross payment volume reached $84 billion in the fourth quarter, with penetration expanding to 68% of gross merchandise volume. Shop Pay now processes more than half of total U.S. payment volume, and Shopify Payments is available in more than 20 countries.
Tillman outlined five reasons Shopify is well positioned for the rise of agentic commerce: the company’s global merchant network, its depth of commerce data, its system-of-record role for merchants, protocol development efforts such as the Universal Commerce Protocol, and its position as a trusted operating system for brands.
Brokerage moves in aggregate
The week’s moves highlight how sell-side firms are positioning around a narrow set of structural themes: the sequencing of product ramps for AI-focused semiconductors, the interplay between capital spending and data center capacity for cloud providers, the demand pull-ins and inventory timing in server and client hardware, and the potential for agentic AI features to alter commerce monetization. Across these notes, analysts are balancing near-term margin and supply-side pressures against medium-term revenue acceleration tied to AI deployments.
While each firm’s view is tailored to company-specific signals - product roadmaps at Nvidia, capex yield at Amazon, memory pricing and AI order backlogs at Dell, inventory and industrial recovery at Analog Devices, and payments and agentic commerce adoption at Shopify - the common thread is expectation for AI demand to continue reshaping revenue mixes and growth profiles over the next several quarters.
What to watch next
- For Nvidia: investor attention around the mid-March GTC event and quarterly results that Citi expects to exceed consensus.
- For Amazon: indicators of data center capacity deliveries and reported contributions from agentic features that could validate Morgan Stanley’s capex yield construct and agentic commerce thesis.
- For Dell: January-quarter results relative to Evercore’s expectations and margin commentary tied to memory pricing and dynamic pricing actions.
- For Analog Devices: signs of a restocking cycle and further evidence of demand normalizing in industrial end markets.
- For Shopify: the degree to which payments penetration and agentic commerce initiatives translate into durable revenue expansion.
The analyst notes and rating changes reinforce that market participants are parsing product cycles, capex cadence and customer inventory behavior to set near-term expectations while also forming longer-term convictions about AI-related revenue streams.