By Sam Boughedda
BofA analysts told investors in a research note that the firm's Steam survey shows NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) strong share gains are continuing.
The biggest takeaway from the survey is NVDA's surprising jump in GPU share to 82.6% of gamers, up 700bps month-on-month, said analysts. However, analysts warned that they "assess data with caution."
They noted that March data shows participants in the survey using Simplified Chinese as their operating system language expanded to 51.7% (versus 26%-27% last month), which could potentially be related to the reopening of China e-cafes.
"While still generally positive for NVDA, we note overcounting of customers at Asian cyber cafes inflated NVDA share results in prior periods as well (2017/18, potentially late 2020)," the analysts added.
Despite potential survey issues, analysts believe it still highlighted a number of positives for the company.
"Like last cycle, both AMD/NVDA have actively cleared channel in early stages of new card launches (NVDA RTX 40 series, AMD 7900 XT/XTX), which should provide ASP boosts (we model 10% YoY increase in CY23) in conjunction with easier unit comps. More importantly, hyperscaler focus on AI/LLMs could accelerate investment in NVDA/AMD for both training and inference applications. We maintain Buy on NVDA/AMD ahead of potentially strong product ramps," the analysts added.
They also believe the proliferation of AI and the development of large language models with a growing number of parameters can expand opportunities in the data center for both NVDA and AMD (NASDAQ:AMD).