This NVIDIA Partnership Shows How Big AI Can Really Get

Key Points

• NVIDIA’s valuation remains compelling in early 2026, with long-term forecasts suggesting potential gains of 200% to 500% over the next decade.
• New partnerships—including a $1 billion AI drug discovery initiative with Eli Lilly—highlight NVIDIA’s expanding role beyond GPUs.
• Analysts cite robotics and accelerated AI adoption as key 2026 growth drivers, with earnings and guidance expected to confirm bullish sentiment.

NVIDIA’s NASDAQ: NVDA market is heating up, approaching the boiling point once again, as its long-term outlook swells and the valuation becomes irresistible. Trading at 40x earnings in early 2026, this market fails to price in what is quickly becoming an overly cautious forecast.

Driven by NVIDIA’s move beyond GPUs, the company, not just its hardware, is quickly becoming critical to the advancement of business across sectors and industries. 

As it stands, the stock is valued at only eight times its 2035 earnings forecast, suggesting investors can expect as much as a 200% gain over the next decade. And that is just to match the S&P 500, assuming NVIDIA continues to command a premium, as it deserves, given its position in the AI ecosystem, the gains could run in the 300% to 500% range before topping out. 

NVIDIA and Eli Lilly Invest $1 Billion in Accelerated Drug Discovery

The latest evidence of NVIDIA’s commanding presence in the AI ecosystem is new details about its partnership with Eli Lilly NYSE: LLY. First hinted at the CES conference, the collaboration aims to build an AI supercomputer to accelerate not only drug discovery, but also manufacturing processes, applications, and other health-related insights. The first of its kind, the plan includes a loop-style system in which AI-generated discoveries aid physicians, and physicians, using AI-enabled experimentation tools, aid the advancement of AI models, together accelerating and disrupting the drug discovery industry. 

And this is not a small market. Drug discovery is worth upward of $105 billion as of the end of 2025 and is expected to grow at a high-single-digit, nearly 10% compounded annual growth rate for the foreseeable future. Within that, AI-enabled discovery accounts for less than 20% of today’s market and is expected to grow by 6x within the next eight years. More significantly, drug discovery is an inroad to the even more lucrative drug production and sales market, a market worth more than $550 million in the US alone.

Other sectors in which NVIDIA has entrenched itself include machinery and heavy equipment, automotive, telecommunications, energy, retail, and robotics. Work with Caterpillar NYSE: CAT enables the autonomous functioning, management, and deployment of fleet equipment, while Archer Aviation NYSE: ACHR, a key player in eVTOL aircraft, is integrating NVIDIA’s Thor IGX platform into its aircraft. Thor is a scalable, industrial-grade AI application that enables the complex tasks required by advanced robotic systems in a unified solution.

Analysts Identify Robotics as Catalyst for NVIDIA Stock Price

Analysts at BNP Paribas, following the CES conference, highlighted robotics as a catalyst for NVIDIA in 2026. They see emerging use cases driving demand for development and the hardware to run applications, ranging from small, IoT-connected devices to humanoid robots and large-scale industrial machinery. Compute space and inference will also be a driver, with bottlenecks in the DRAM market potentially not a problem, as most manufacturers will shift focus to HBM and AI markets, rather than consumers. 

Aside from all else, the Q4 fiscal year 2026 earnings report will be a catalyst for this market. The analysts have set the bar high, forecasting year-over-year revenue growth to accelerate to over 65%. Assuming the company continues its current trends, it will outperform this figure and provide another solid set of guidance, affirming the valuation outlook and the bullish analyst sentiment. Analysts rate this stock a Buy, with the rating up from last year. The consensus is for a 40% upside relative to January support levels. 

The chart suggests that a catalyst might trigger a significant bullish surge. The decline in late 2025 allowed the market to cool down and set the stage for an upward move. By early 2026, support levels are well-defined, and although the signals are still in their early stages, the indicators indicate a trend-following movement.