Nvidia stock hit an all-time high on May 14, 2026. Since then, it has lost roughly $1 trillion in market value. The stock is down about 16% from that peak, trading around $204, while the broader market has mostly moved higher. For investors who bought in during the spring run-up, it has been a rough two months with no clear catalyst to point to.

Atif Malik, a Citi analyst who has covered Nvidia through most of its AI-era rise, published a note on July 8 after a direct call with Nvidia’s investor relations team. His message was not complicated: the concerns driving the selloff are real, but the product roadmap is intact, and the stock is cheaper than it has been in years.

Citi reiterates Nvidia Buy rating with $300 price target after investor call

Atif Malik, ranked number 3 out of more than 12,000 analysts tracked by TipRanks with an 81% success rate, reiterated his Buy rating and kept his $300 price target in place, according to Seeking Alpha.

With Nvidia trading around $204, that target implies roughly 47% upside from current levels. His note followed a conversation with Nvidia’s investor relations team that addressed the specific issues weighing on the stock.

The first thing Malik came away with is that Nvidia’s product roadmap is fully intact. That includes the next-generation Kyber chip line. There are no significant delays. The concerns circulating about supply chain disruptions and product timelines do not appear to be grounded in anything Nvidia’s IR team confirmed.

On margins, Nvidia told Citi that long-term memory deals it has in place should protect gross margins from the kind of pressure some investors feared. The company is maintaining a mid-70s gross margin target, according to Yahoo Finance. For a company of Nvidia’s scale and growth rate, holding margins there while revenue keeps expanding is meaningful.

Malik also noted that Nvidia’s NVLink networking interconnect and its optics plans, both of which have been the subject of investor questions, remain on schedule.

Why Nvidia stock is at its cheapest valuation since 2019

The two-month selloff has done something unusual to Nvidia’s valuation. The stock is now trading at roughly 18 to 19 times forward earnings, its lowest multiple since early 2019, back when Nvidia was still thought of primarily as a video game chip and bitcoin mining play.

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Malik views that as an opportunity. The correction started in mid-May when investors began rotating into memory chip names like Micron and Sandisk. That rotation pulled money out of Nvidia without anything fundamentally changing at the company. The business that was worth all-time-high prices in May has not changed. The sentiment has.

As TheStreet reported, Bank of America made a similar valuation argument on July 8, with analyst Vivek Arya setting a $350 price target. Both banks are pointing at the same thing: Nvidia’s stock is trading like the AI story is over at a moment when the company’s own pipeline suggests it is not.

What Nvidia told Citi about buybacks and returning cash to shareholders

The investor relations call also covered capital return. Nvidia reiterated its target of returning 50% of cash flow to shareholders this year. The company raised its dividend to $0.25 per share from $0.01 earlier this year and announced a new $80 billion stock buyback program on top of an existing $39 billion authorization that still has room to run.

“As it moves to outer years, management mentioned that given where the stock is, they can expect the company to increase buybacks,” Malik wrote in the note.

With the stock down 16% from its high, aggressive buybacks could put a floor under the price while also reducing the share count. Companies that buy back stock at depressed valuations tend to generate outsized returns for remaining shareholders when sentiment eventually recovers.

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The concerns Citi says are keeping Nvidia stock depressed right now

Malik did not dismiss the bear case. He addressed it directly. The main investor concerns center on three things: whether AI capital spending by hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will slow down; whether rising memory costs will squeeze margins; and whether custom AI chips from Broadcom and others are gaining enough ground to threaten Nvidia’s dominance.

On the spending question, Malik’s read is that hyperscaler AI investment is not peaking. It is continuing to compound. Nvidia’s own data center revenue grew roughly 75% in its most recent quarter. That is not the growth profile of a company whose customers are pulling back.

On competition, he acknowledged that the custom silicon market is growing but maintained that Nvidia’s dominance in training workloads remains intact. GPUs are still the default for model training, and Nvidia leads that market by a wide margin. Inference is where custom chips have made more headway, but Nvidia has been building out its inference capabilities as well.

There is also a potential China upside that is not in anyone’s estimates. Reports surfaced on July 9 that Nvidia’s H200 chips could re-enter the Chinese market under strict export controls, according to Reuters. Malik’s estimates do not include China. If those restrictions ease, it represents unmodeled revenue upside.

What Citi’s Nvidia note means for investors watching the stock right now

Nvidia’s next earnings report is scheduled for August 26, 2026. Between now and then, the stock will trade on sentiment, news flow, and whatever the broader market does with AI-related names. Malik’s note is not a near-term trading call. It is a fundamental argument that the selloff has created a valuation entry point for investors willing to look past the noise.

The stock signaled a potential breakout from its multi-week correction as of July 9, according to Yahoo Finance. Whether that holds will depend on whether the concerns driving the selloff continue to fade or whether new ones emerge ahead of the August earnings.

For investors who have been watching from the sidelines since the May high, Citi is essentially saying the window may not stay open indefinitely. The product roadmap is intact, margins are holding, the buyback program is in place, and the valuation is the cheapest it has been since before anyone had heard of ChatGPT.

Malik’s case is that all of those things together add up to a buy, not a wait.

Related: Bank of America’s unmistakable signal to Nvidia stock investors