Everything Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA ) has touched has turned to gold in recent years. But while there's no question Nvidia has major exposure to high-growth businesses such as cloud computing and autonomous vehicles, analysts disagree about whether or not Nvidia stock offers value for long-term investors.

According to Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya, early 2018 cloud services spending trends suggest cloud demand for data center suppliers such as Nvidia and Intel Corp. ( INTC ) is booming. Heading into earnings season, demand from Apple ( AAPL ) and the rest of the smartphone market was a major concern for semiconductor investors.

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"Amidst growing concern regarding Apple's iPhone supply chain and general fears of a 'peaking' cycle, better-than-expected cloud spend has been arguably the biggest surprise this earnings season for semis," Arya says.

Wall Street has anticipated impressive 30 percent growth in cloud-related capital expenditures in 2018, but Arya says that growth now seems to be tracking closer to 40 percent.

Arya says that the four largest cloud spenders, Alphabet ( GOOG , GOOGL ), Amazon.com ( AMZN ), Microsoft Corp. ( MSFT ) and Facebook ( FB ) combined for more than $13.7 billion in capital expenditures in the first quarter, up 80 percent from a year ago and $2.4 billion ahead of consensus estimates.

"In our view, the market is not appropriately valuing this benefit for semis, memory and semi-cap companies," Arya said.

Arya says this boom in cloud spending is good for key data center suppliers, and Nvidia is Bank of America's top overall semiconductor stock pick.

Cloud demand is stronger than ever, but Morningstar analyst Abhinav Davuluri says the market may have gotten ahead of itself in valuing Nvidia's AV business. Nvidia has been a market leader in early AV hardware and software development, but Davuluri says Intel will ultimately be the AV market leader.

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"We estimate a $7 billion total addressable market by 2025 for Intel and Nvidia's autonomous platform solutions and estimate both entities will capture meaningful portions of this opportunity," Davuluri says. "Consequently, Nvidia still looks materially overvalued, while Intel appears modestly undervalued, in our view."

Bank of America has a "buy" rating and $300 price target for Nvidia. Morningstar has an "overvalued" rating and $120 fair value estimate for NVDA stock .

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