Morgan Stanley reinstates Nvidia as top pick, keeps overweight rating and $300 target

Morgan Stanley has removed Nvidia as its top pick. The bank is still keeping its overweight rating on the stock.

The change is notable because of how recently the bank championed the chipmaker. Only weeks ago, Nvidia sat at the top of Morgan Stanley’s semiconductor rankings.

From headliner to supporting cast

Wall Street ratings come in layers. An overweight rating means analysts expect a stock to outperform its peers or benchmark over time.

A top pick is a smaller, more exclusive club. It marks the single name analysts would choose first if forced to pick one.

So Morgan Stanley is still bullish on Nvidia. It just no longer ranks the company first among its semiconductor ideas.

The timing stands out against the bank’s own recent record. On October 2, 2026, Morgan Stanley reinstated Nvidia as its top semiconductor pick after meetings with company management.

That note kept the overweight rating and set a $300 price target. Nvidia shares rose approximately 1.5% in premarket trading after it came out.

The endorsement held into November. In a sector update dated November 9-10, 2026, the bank still ranked Nvidia as its top semiconductor stock.

That same update also flagged potential rebounds in memory shares.

What the bulls were pointing to

The semiconductor team behind the call is led by analyst Joseph Moore. His group made a detailed case for Nvidia in its earlier research.

One pillar was customer diversity. Morgan Stanley noted that roughly 50% of Nvidia’s customer base extends beyond the large hyperscalers.

The bank counted about 80 cloud partners for Nvidia. Of those, 55 are located outside the US.

Morgan Stanley framed that spread as an advantage in dealing with power and financing constraints.

The second pillar was product roadmap. The bank estimated that Nvidia’s upcoming Feynman architecture could potentially lift revenue per gigawatt to over $50 billion.

That compares with approximately $40 billion from the prior Rubin generation.

The third pillar was price. Morgan Stanley noted Nvidia traded at approximately 15 times its FY2028 EPS estimate, a valuation it called “very undemanding.”

What this means for investors

The first takeaway is that this is a demotion in ranking, not in rating. Morgan Stanley still expects Nvidia to outperform.

Investors who bought on the October top-pick call have not been told to sell. They have been told, in effect, that the bank now sees at least comparable opportunity elsewhere.

The second takeaway concerns the thesis itself. The arguments the bank laid out, from customer breadth to the Feynman revenue estimate to valuation, were built around a long runway.

None of those points has been formally withdrawn alongside the top-pick removal. The open question is whether the bank’s $300 price target and earnings assumptions hold in its next update.

The third takeaway is about sentiment. Nvidia shares moved approximately 1.5% premarket on the October reinstatement, showing how responsive the stock can be to this kind of call.

Power and financing constraints were specifically named as challenges Nvidia’s customer diversity helps offset.

The Feynman transition is another checkpoint. The jump to over $50 billion in revenue per gigawatt is a Morgan Stanley estimate, not a guarantee.

For now, Nvidia remains on Morgan Stanley’s buy-side shortlist. It has simply lost the front-row seat it reclaimed only weeks earlier.