Wall Street fears Nvidia (NVDA) is quietly turning into a bank for the AI boom. Bank of America (BofA) says that fear is exactly why Nvidia stock trades at up to a 50% discount, and it kept its $350 target.

Analyst Vivek Arya made the call as Nvidia guaranteed up to $105 billion in leases for an OpenAI data center in Ohio. Earnings arrive on August 26.

Why Investors Fear Nvidia’s New Role as AI Financier

On Monday, Nvidia agreed to backstop up to $105 billion in leases at a new Ohio data center campus. SB Energy, a developer backed by SoftBank and OpenAI, will build and own the site.

The campus sits on a Cold War-era uranium enrichment site in Pike County. OpenAI signed a 20-year lease for the facility, according to Nvidia’s announcement.

The worry is easy to grasp. Nvidia sells chips to OpenAI, has pledged to invest up to $100 billion in the company under a 2025 partnership, and now backs its rent. Critics call the money loop circular.

However, Arya says the market is misreading the deal. Nvidia does not guarantee OpenAI’s full rent. It covers only the leftover gap if OpenAI defaults and the site is re-leased or sold. Even then, the bill is capped at $105 billion, well below the $250 billion floated in earlier reports.

There is also a prize for taking that risk. Nvidia becomes the exclusive AI compute provider on the campus, locking rivals out of scarce land and power. CEO Jensen Huang put the logic plainly in the release, saying

“land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI.”

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BofA Sees Nvidia Stock at a 34% to 50% Discount

Arya values Nvidia piece by piece on its free cash flow. Even after loading in every financing risk, his math shows the shares trading 34% to 50% below fair value.

“Nvidia’s ecosystem investments, especially into disruptive frontier labs and neoclouds, are critical to accelerating the [artificial-intelligence] cycle, though they risk lower earnings quality and a depressed trading multiple,” said Arya in his latest note.

Neoclouds are smaller cloud firms built to rent out graphics processing units (GPUs). In plain terms, Arya thinks the deals speed up the AI boom, even if they scare shareholders today.

His fix is simple. Nvidia puts only about half of its free cash flow into buybacks, while peers return 75% to 100%. A bigger program would hand cash back, ease doubts about earnings quality, and could lift the multiple.

Wall Street Consensus and the August 26 Test

Nvidia stock, NVDA, traded for $219.74 as of this writing. A run to $350 means roughly 59% upside, or about $3 trillion in added value on its $5.45 trillion market cap.

Arya is bullish but far from alone. TipRanks data shows 36 of 37 analysts rate the stock a Buy, with an average target of $309.94. Even the lowest target on the Street, at $250, sits above the current price.

The risks are real, though. If AI demand cools, re-leasing a giant Ohio campus becomes much harder. The stock has also dropped after past earnings six times since August 2024.

Arya expects Nvidia to detail its off-balance-sheet commitments on August 26. If that disclosure lands well, the discount he sees may finally start to close.

Source: BeInCrypto