Nvidia Balances Local-AI Rollout and Buyback Muscle Against a Cloudier OpenAI Picture

Nvidia and Microsoft will start selling RTX Spark AI laptops on October 16; UBS keeps a $300 target as AI demand worries linger.

Nvidia is pressing ahead on two fronts at once: putting artificial intelligence directly onto Windows machines and keeping a lid on any doubts about the broader appetite for its chips. The company, working alongside Microsoft, will begin selling the first RTX Spark laptops on October 16, with pre-orders already open. Compact desktop systems are slated to follow in November. The pitch behind the joint effort is straightforward — run specialized AI agents on the PC itself rather than routing every computation through remote cloud infrastructure.

That hardware push lands in a market that spent the week wrestling with how fast AI spending can really grow. Shares of the chipmaker finished Friday modestly lower, slipping 0.4% to EUR 204.80, though the stock remains within striking distance of its 52-week high of EUR 216.10 touched earlier this month.

Two Signals, One Anxious Sector

The softness traced back to Thursday, when technology names sold off after media reports put OpenAI's annualized September revenue at roughly $50 billion. That figure fell short of the $68–70 billion investors had previously been led to expect. It is worth being precise about what that number represents: an annualized run-rate, not revenue already booked, and it was not a disclosure from Nvidia itself. The link to Nvidia's stock ran entirely through jitters about AI demand.

Against that, UBS reaffirmed its buy rating on Nvidia, with analyst Timothy Arcuri holding firm on a $300 price target. His supporting evidence came from Taiwan's September exports in the automatic data-processing category, which he read as consistent with healthy underlying AI demand. Arcuri was careful to frame the trade data as a supporting signal rather than proof — a caveat that sits right alongside the recommendation itself. A positive indicator can soften demand worries without erasing them, and the UBS call does not claim all demand risk has vanished.

Buybacks, Research Dollars and a SpaceX Financing Plan

Where the balance sheet is concerned, Nvidia has considerable room to maneuver. The board authorized an additional $150 billion for share repurchases, lifting the remaining buyback capacity to $235 billion. The company also committed $1 billion to multi-year scientific initiatives spanning quantum computing, energy security and healthcare.

Analysts have taken note of the franchise's staying power. Yorkville Ives initiated coverage on Wednesday with an "Outperform" rating and a $300 target, citing Nvidia's position as the foundational computing platform for the entire AI economy.

Demand signals keep arriving from other directions too. Reports indicate SpaceX is seeking a $40 billion debt financing to purchase Nvidia processors, though the same reporting made clear these are ongoing talks — no completed deal or confirmed order exists. The distinction matters: a financing plan is not the same as a purchase order.

A Confirmed Date, an Unconfirmed Order Book

One date is certain. Nvidia is set to deliver a keynote at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose on October 12. Nothing about additional orders or product launches can be inferred from that appearance alone.

Taken together, the week offered investors a positive read on demand from UBS, tempered by the analyst's own explicit limits on how much the export data can prove — set beside a sector still digesting the OpenAI revenue revision.