“If you invested $10,000 in Nvidia ten years ago, you'd now hold around $1.5 million,” said one market analyst, highlighting the unprecedented scale of Nvidia's growth. No other S&P 500 stock comes close to matching this feat. The chipmaker’s 15,333% return over the last decade places it well above all other companies in the index, driven largely by the surge in AI infrastructure demand.
Nvidia’s GPUs are the backbone of artificial intelligence training and inference workloads, a niche the company has dominated since the rise of machine learning. In 2025 alone, Nvidia contributed an astonishing 15.5% to the S&P 500’s total 17.9% return. To put it simply, nearly one in every six dollars the index made last year was thanks to Nvidia. The company’s weight in the index is now close to 8%, making it one of the biggest pillars of the market.
What makes this achievement more remarkable is Nvidia’s transformation. Originally focused on gaming GPUs for high-performance graphics, the company pivoted when the AI community realized that its parallel processing chips were perfect for neural network computations. While competitors like AMD, Intel, and custom silicon projects from tech giants have tried to chip away at Nvidia’s dominance, none have seriously dented its share of the AI training segment, which is where the largest revenues come from.
However, 2026 has brought some cooling off. Nvidia’s stock has only gained about 7-8% year-to-date, underperforming both the broader market and the PHLX Semiconductor Sector Index. This slowdown reflects concerns that the AI hardware spending spree may be shifting. Major cloud providers might now focus more on squeezing additional performance from existing hardware instead of buying new GPUs, which could limit Nvidia’s revenue growth. Added to this are geopolitical challenges, including export restrictions on advanced chips that continue to threaten Nvidia’s global market access.
