- Oppenheimer targets 35% upside for Nvidia amid data center dominance.
- Palantir positioned for 62% gain from AIP platform expansion.
- Fear & Greed Index at 12 signals optimal buying amid crypto dips.
Rick Schafer picks AI stocks Nvidia and Palantir with 35% and 62% upside on April 13, 2026. Oppenheimer sets Nvidia (NVDA) at $192 and Palantir (PLTR) at $46. The CNN Fear & Greed Index hit 12 as Bitcoin dropped 1.2% to $70,805.
Schafer shared picks via The Motley Fool. Investors eye AI stocks for stability in volatility.
Nvidia Dominates AI Chips with Rubin Boost
Nvidia closed at $142.50 on April 13, 2026, per Nasdaq. Oppenheimer's Schafer targets $192, a 35% gain.
Nvidia powers 90% of large language model training, per Nvidia investor relations. Q1 fiscal 2026 data center revenue reached $30.1 billion, up 427% year-over-year.
Rubin architecture launches late 2026. It doubles Blackwell performance on H100-equivalent benchmarks, Nvidia announced. Daily access to 10 million H100-equivalent compute units supports this lead.
AMD's MI300X trails by 1.2x on MLPerf inference, per MLPerf benchmarks. Nvidia's CUDA software creates a lock-in moat, reducing developer switching costs by 50% in retraining, industry estimates show.
Forward P/E at 45x beats 2024 peak of 60x. Data center margins hit 78%, driving $2.5 billion free cash flow quarterly.
Palantir Accelerates via AIP and Contracts
Palantir closed at $28.40, per Nasdaq. Schafer's $46 target implies 62% upside.
Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) fuses large language models with enterprise data using ontology-based reasoning. This structures unstructured data 5x faster than traditional ETL pipelines.
U.S. Army awarded $178 million contract on April 1, 2026, Palantir disclosed. Q1 commercial revenue grew 40% to $1.2 billion.
Annual bootcamps total 300, converting 70% to pilots. Gross margins reached 82%, versus industry 65% average.
PLTR stock rose 150% since AIP launch, per I/O Fund's Beth Kindig.
Wedbush Forecasts $200B AI Capex Surge
Wedbush's Dan Ives projects $200 billion infrastructure spend in 2026, per CNBC coverage. Hyperscalers target 5 million GPUs by year-end.
Amazon and Microsoft plan $75 billion combined capex. Schafer stresses Nvidia hardware moats; Ives highlights software upside.
This capex equates to 40% compute cost reductions at scale, saving enterprises $50 billion annually by 2027, Wedbush models.
Fear & Greed at 12 Flags Entry Point
Fear & Greed Index at 12 matches 2022 lows, CNN reports. Ethereum fell 1.3% to $2,187; XRP dropped 0.2% to $1.33.
AI stocks buck crypto trends. NVDA gained 5% the prior week despite Nasdaq dips, Yahoo Finance shows. PLTR holds above 50-day moving average.
Valuations attract: NVDA P/E 45x on 100% growth; PLTR 85x on 50% revenue expansion.
Benchmarks Bolster Bull Case
Nvidia GB200 NVL72 racks deliver 1.4 exaflops FP4, cutting Grok-3 training 4x, Nvidia benchmarks confirm.
Palantir AIP queries 100TB datasets 10x faster than Snowflake, Palantir claims.
JPMorgan's Harlan Sur rates NVDA overweight, eyeing $150 billion data center run rate by Q4 2026.
Risks from Competitors and Capex
AMD ships 20,000 MI325X quarterly. Broadcom ASICs take 15% share.
Palantir battles C3.ai and Snowflake; government revenue is 20%.
Schafer models 25% downside on capex slowdown but banks on $1 trillion AI spend by 2030.
AI Inflows Defy Crypto Volatility
BNB rose 0.4% to $596.91; USDT stable at $1.00.
Tech ETFs drew $50 billion inflows last quarter, Bloomberg reports.
Oppenheimer rates both overweight. Nvidia reports May 22, 2026; updates follow Q2 on August 28. AI stocks test these targets amid capex momentum.
