Though most analysts view artificial intelligence as a game-changing opportunity, not everyone on Wall Street shares in this optimism.

For the better part of the last three years, nothing has captivated the attention and capital of investors quite like artificial intelligence (AI). The seemingly limitless possibilities of empowering software and systems with AI can be a game-changer for most industries around the globe. It’s why PwC pegged this global addressable opportunity at a jaw-dropping $15.7 trillion by 2030 in Sizing the Prize.

While there’s no denying that investor hype surrounding the potential for AI has sent dozens of stocks soaring, not everyone on Wall Street shares in this optimism.

In particular, the bar has been set especially low for two of Wall Street’s trillion-dollar AI stocks. Keep in mind, only 10 publicly traded companies on U.S. exchanges have reached the trillion-dollar valuation mark, and not all of these companies are focused on artificial intelligence.

Based on the price target prognostications of select Wall Street analysts, the following two trillion-dollar AI stocks can plunge by up to 95% over the next year.

Image source: Getty Images.

Nvidia: Implied downside of 44%

The first trillion-dollar AI stock you might be shocked to see among possible plunge candidates is the world’s largest publicly traded company, Nvidia (NVDA -2.62%).

Bullishness on Wall Street for Nvidia is nearly universal. Out of the 65 analysts who’ve weighed in on the company, a combined 59 have it rated the equivalent of a buy or strong buy, as of September 2025, with another five chiming in with the equivalent of a hold rating.

The reason for this optimism has to do with Nvidia dominating the AI-graphics processing unit (GPU) space. It began with the Hopper (H100) and has continued with the next-gen Blackwell and now Blackwell Ultra GPUs. No external chip companies are remotely close to matching the compute capabilities of Nvidia’s AI hardware, which has led to a sizable backlog and enviable AI-GPU pricing power.

Nevertheless, Seaport Global analyst Jay Goldberg stands out as Wall Street’s lone wolf when it comes to Nvidia. He has a sell rating on the company with a price target of just $100, which would imply downside of up to 44%, if accurate.

Goldberg had a laundry list of warnings in his latest research note that maintained his and his firm’s $100 price target, including:

• Concerns about a sequential quarterly slowdown in data center sales growth.
• Unjustified optimism surrounding agentic AI, which has a rather small commercial market at the moment.
• Nvidia’s China exposure, with delays in shipments of AI chips to the world’s No. 2 economy giving external competitors in China the opportunity to gain ground.

But in my opinion, Goldberg might be missing the two biggest threats to Nvidia stock.

First, we haven’t seen a next-big-thing investment trend avoid an eventual early stage bubble-bursting event in more than 30 years. Investors consistently overestimate the early stage adoption and/or utility of game-changing technologies, which leads to lofty expectations not being met. Given that most businesses have yet to optimize their AI solutions or generate a positive return on their invested capital, there’s a very high probability, based on historical precedent, of an AI bubble forming and bursting.

The second concern for Nvidia is that many of its top customers by net sales are internally developing AI-GPUs for their data centers. Even though these chips won’t be sold externally, and they’re not a match for Nvidia’s hardware on a compute basis, they are notably cheaper and not backlogged. There’s a good chance Nvidia may lose out on valuable data center real estate going forward, or at the very least contend with delayed upgrade cycles from its top customers.

Image source: Tesla.

Tesla: Implied downside of 95%

But when it comes to implied downside, electric-vehicle (EV) maker Tesla (TSLA 0.98%), which integrates AI solutions into its EVs, takes the cake.

Unlike Nvidia, Tesla has its fair share of skeptics. More than 10% of the 45 analysts covering the company in September rate it as the equivalent of an underperform or sell. This includes GLJ Research founder and analyst Gordon Johnson.

Earlier this year, Johnson reduced his price target on Tesla to just $19.05 per share. Keeping in mind that Tesla stock closed out the previous week at nearly $396 per share, it implies downside of roughly 95%.

Although Tesla has been profitable in each of the last five years, Johnson, a longtime Tesla bear, has a number of critiques to offer.

To begin with, he’s been critical of Tesla’s ancillary projects beyond EVs and energy generation and storage products. For instance, the hype surrounding Optimus robots has added to Tesla’s valuation but provides minimal value to the Tesla brand and little hope of any near-term sales.

Gordon Johnson also pointed to Tesla’s operating structure as a reason to be skeptical of its stock. While most “Magnificent Seven” members are thriving off of high-margin software sales, the bulk of Tesla’s sales are coming from lower-margin hardware where it possesses less pricing power. The more than half-dozen price cuts Tesla has undertaken on its fleet of EVs over the last couple of years is evidence that its competitive edge in the EV space has shrunk.

Johnson has been critical of Tesla’s mind-numbing valuation, as well. Whereas most automakers are valued at high-single-digit or low-double-digit price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples, Tesla shares are valued at an estimated 234 times forecast earnings per share in 2025. Worse yet, more than half of Tesla’s pre-tax income has originated from non-innovative and/or unsustainable sources, such as automotive regulatory credits and interest income on its cash.

Though a decline to $19.05 per share seems highly unlikely, there are other reasons to believe Tesla stock can head notably lower. Specifically, CEO Elon Musk hasn’t given investors much reason to be optimistic of late. Cybertruck sales have been a disappointment and the robotaxi launch event in Austin, Texas, was underwhelming.

These disappointments speak to a broader issue with governance at Tesla. Namely, Musk has a habit of overpromising and underdelivering. Whether it’s promising Level 5 autonomy is “one year” away for 11 straight years or projecting 1 million robotaxis would be on public roads by 2020, Musk consistently misses the mark.

The issue from an investment standpoint is that these lofty promises are being baked into Tesla’s stock. If these unfulfilled promises are backed out, it becomes very possible for Tesla shares to lose a significant percentage of their value.

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Stock market prognosticators are wrong so frequently that observers can rightly wonder if they’re making forecasts using the oldest soothsaying methods, drawing pebbles from a pile, dropping hot wax into water, using random dots on paper or, of course, trying to find something magical in numbers.

Yet at the start of every year – and again at the midpoint – countless market watchers take their crack at divining the future, mixing educated conjecture, informed hunches and the occasional WAG (wild-ass guess).

Related: Veteran analyst drops updated stock market forecast

Measured just about any way possible, most of those projections are wrong.

CXO Advisory Group analyzed more than 6,500 forecasts—using methodologies ranging from fundamental to technical analysis—made by 68 experts on the U.S. stock market from 2005 through 2012. The investigation found that the accuracy of the forecasts was below 47% on average.

That loses to a coin flip.

From Black Monday star to today’s afterthought

Bad calls tend to be forgotten quickly, as soon as a forecast is updated based on new information. Winning picks are lionized and celebrated, even though the expert may have less staying power than a bull market rally.

Wall Streeters sometimes call the tendency to place too much trust in a guru who made the most recent good call the “Elaine Garzarelli Effect.” Garzarelli made her reputation as a Lehman Brothers investment strategist by urging clients to get out of the stock market the week before the Black Monday crash in 1987.

That call made her one of the most widely quoted strategists on the Street, but it was also the pinnacle of her success. Whether it was brilliant prescience or dumb luck may be argued forever, but she never really duplicated that success. 

Garzarelli failed to generate much interest when she tried running mutual funds and a call on stocks being 25% undervalued late in 2007 as the global financial crisis was looming, further dimmed her star.

While old-timers remember her name – she runs Garzarelli Research and her newsletter suggests that she is currently bullish on small- and mid-caps plus transportation stocks – she is like many one-time stars, known more for one right call than for being right consistently over years or decades.

Bob Doll’s forecast record beats coin flips, by a lot

One Wall Street analyst who hasn’t shied away from forecasts — and has a stellar track record — is Bob Doll, chief executive and investment officer at Crossmark Global Investors. 

In a 40-plus-year career, Doll has also been the top equity strategist at Blackrock, Nuveen, Merrill Lynch, and Oppenheimer Funds; at each of those stops, Doll—a regular guest on CNBC, Fox Business, and seemingly all financial media outlets—has started each year with 10 forecasts for the coming 12 months.

Related: Top analyst sends message on pending ugly earnings miss (plus one big beat)

Doll holds his picks up to a grader each year and historically has been right 72% of the time. That’s roughly where he stood with his 2024 prognostications. He has said that his best years ever put him at just above 80%.

Entering 2025, Doll was expecting “fewer tailwinds, but more tail risks.” His picks reflected that, calling for “some bumps in the road, but some good news and probably more volatility,” in an interview on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe that aired in January.

Now, seven months later, Doll is getting the results he expected.

Eight of Doll’s 10 picks tend to be tied to the economy and stock market, with one tied to politics and a wildcard. This is what Doll was calling for entering 2025, and how it’s turning out:

• Slower economic growth as unemployment rises past 4.5%. The jury is out on this one, but if unemployment hits Doll’s target – it’s currently just north of 4% — mark this as a win.
• Sticky inflation that stays above Fed’s 2% target, causing the central bank to cut rates less than expected. Barring a Fed surprise, this one’s on track.10-year Treasury yields primarily between 4% and 5% with wider credit spreads. The 10-year Treasury has spent the year in that range; credit spreads were up around the tariff tantrum but have narrowed since. But if there’s an economic slowdown, they will widen and this one will be a winner.
• Earnings fail to achieve the market’s consensus 14% expectation entering the year, and yet every sector has up earnings. This forecast is virtually a lock at this point, even with Doll expecting a second-half slowdown that could hurt some sectors.
• Equity volatility rises, with the VIX average approaching 20. The VIX averaged 18.5 in the first quarter and 24.4 in the second, so this call –and the VIX has only been this high in two of the last 13 calendar years – might have seemed like a longshot but now looks like a sure shot.
• Stocks experience a 10% correction and price/earnings ratios contract. The correction went on the books in April, and P/E ratios are down and appear likely to stay that way. This can be marked in the win column.
• Equal-weighted portfolios beat cap-weighted portfolios and value beats growth. Both of these conditions are true at the moment; the question is whether that will hold up through December.
• Financials, energy and consumer staples outperform healthcare, technology and industrials. This looked like a sure thing into June, when the margin of outperformance shrank. If financials weaken, it could put this one in jeopardy; barring that, it looks like another win.
• “Congress passes the Trump tax cut extension, reduces regulation, but tariffs and deportation are less than expected.” The tariff forecast here is the one thing where Doll looks like he’s wrong and won’t recover; by year’s end, this one is likely to look half-right, making it the one clear blemish that’s building.DOGE efforts make progress but fall far short of $2 trillion in annualized savings. Even Doll acknowledges that this was a softball.

In a July 22 interview on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe, Doll acknowledged that he now expects to be right at least 70 percent of the time, “but I wish coming into the year we knew which seven we were going to get right. We could make a lot of money. The problem is you don’t know which ones you’re going to get right and wrong.”

What Bob Doll think happens for the rest of 2025

As for the rest of 2025, Doll gave three quick assessments for where things stand now: “One, the economy is slowing. We just don’t know how much it’s going to slow. Two, we’re beginning to see tariffs show up in the inflation numbers. We don’t know how much. And number three we have this tailwind called [artificial intelligence] which is real and is keeping things moving.”

Further, Doll said he expects the AI play to broaden out. The tailwind called AI has also been particularly strong at the high end of the market. We all were expecting some measure of breadth this year. Are we going to see the breadth show up at some point? Yeah. Well, it obviously occurred in the first quarter, and then it went away in the second quarter.

While Doll noted that tariffs seem to be showing up in slight increases in the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, he did not think they would cause a spike in inflation over the rest of the year.

“I don’t think [the impact of tariffs on inflation] it’s going to be horrible,” he said. “It’s just going to be there. Remember, only 15% approximately of our GDP is from outside the United States. The other 85 is pretty domestic. So it’s limited by how much of the economy it really affects.

“Now, having said that, remember the Fed saying ‘We’ve got to get inflation down to 2% and they’re struggling at 3% and we’re not going to get to 2%. And that means all these people who want the Fed to lower rates are going to have to wait a little bit longer.”

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