$1,000 In Nvidia Stock 5 Years Ago Is Now $12,000 & NVDA Is Still A Buy

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has touted the transformational potential of artificial intelligence long before it went mainstream.

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A $1,000 investment in Nvidia (NVDA) five years ago would be worth more than $12,000 today. The chipmaker’s stock has enjoyed a remarkable run, fueled by surging demand for its high-powered GPUs amid the AI boom.

This wasn’t a hype-driven rally. The stock never got ahead of its fundamentals; if anything, investors were late to recognize what Nvidia had been quietly building for years. When AI’s moment arrived, Nvidia was ready to embrace it.

Nvidia Vs. SPY: Which Delivered Better Returns Over The Last 5 Years

Over the last five years, Nvidia executed two stock splits:

A 4-for-1 split on July 20, 2021A 10-for-1 split on June 10, 2024

On Oct. 14, 2020, Nvidia closed at $14.05 on a split-adjusted basis. That means a $1,000 investment would have bought 71 shares.

As of Oct. 14, 2025, Nvidia closed at $180.03 per share, making those 71 shares worth $12,782.13—a more than 12x return, and that’s excluding any dividends received along the way.

For comparison, a $1,000 investment in the SPY ETF, which tracks the S&P 500 index, would have grown to $1,986.69 in the same period.

The takeaway? Whether you held or missed out, Nvidia’s return has been extraordinary.

What drove this exponential return?

Nvidia’s Key Growth Catalysts And Stock Performance In The Past 5 Years

Nvidia’s strategic pivot — repurposing its powerful graphics chips for AI workloads — proved transformational as AI became a dominant investment theme after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. Though AI had been evolving for decades, ChatGPT made it tangible, accessible and personal for the mainstream.. Nvidia positioned itself at the center of the AI narrative, capturing demand from cloud providers, data centers and enterprises racing to build next-generation infrastructure.

In May 2020, Nvidia launched the A100, the first GPU based on its Ampere architecture. Delivering up to 20x performance improvements over the previous generation Nvidia GPU, A100 quickly became the gold standard for AI. Major customers included Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Baidu Cloud, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle. After the launch, NVDA shares rose from $8 in mid May to end the year at $13.02, representing a gain of 63%

Nvidia stock ended 2021 at $29.36, gaining 125% from the previous year’s close, as the Covid-ridden world embraced high-performance computing for remote work, gaming and data analytics. Demand from crypto mining also contributed to stock gains. In April 2021, Nvidia announced the general availability of Omniverse Enterprise, a 3D simulation platform for creating digital twins and virtual worlds. A key attribute of the Omniverse is to create physically accurate visualizations and simulations of products and environments, reducing the time and costs of physical testing.

Nvidia announced its first Hopper-architecture-based GPU, the NVIDIA H100, in 2022, calling it “the engine of the world’s AI infrastructure.” The H100 was designed to be deployed in every type of data center, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid-cloud and edge. While investor response to the H100 announcement was initially muted, the GPU would prove to be a critical enabler of large-scale AI workloads in the following years.

ChatGPT’s release on Nov 30, 2022, marked an inflection point for AI. Nvidia stock jumped 8% that day — an early sign that the market was beginning to recognize Nvidia’s potential. However, by the end of the year, the Nvidia stock retraced to 2020 levels, wiping out its 2021 gains. A major reason was the crypto market crash, which significantly reduced demand for Nvidia’s gaming GPUs used by miners. The same year, Nvidia faced yet another setback when the U.S. government introduced controls to prevent the chipmaker from exporting its most powerful chips, including the A100 and H100 GPUs to China, threatening a solid revenue stream.

The explosion of investment in generative AI in 2023 led to a surge in demand for AI infrastructure. With its H100 GPUs already in production, Nvidia became a clear beneficiary.. Both institutional and retail investors piled into the AI theme and Nvidia’s stock more than tripled over the year, closing 2023 near $50. Nvidia also crossed $1 trillion in market capitalization for the first time.

The momentum carried into 2024. As major tech companies allocated billions of dollars to expand their AI capabilities, Nvidia’s datacenter revenues soared. At its annual GTC conference in March 2024, Nvidia unveiled its next-generation Blackwell GPU platform, reinforcing optimism about its roadmap. In June 2024, Nvidia executed a 10-for-1 stock split to increase accessibility for investors. Later that year, Nvidia was added to the prestigious Dow Jones Industrial Average – a recognition of its market leadership.

Nvidia’s financial performance has been equally impressive. The AI bellwether more than doubled its revenues for fiscal 2024 and then doubled its revenues again in fiscal 2025 in rapid succession. Positive investor sentiment drove record inflows into the stock, making Nvidia the most valuable company in the U.S. with a $4.4 trillion market cap. Recently, CEO Jensen Huang confirmed that the exponential demand for AI computing, particularly for the newer Blackwell GPUs, showed no signs of slowing down.

With Nvidia stock setting new highs, some analysts are even forecasting a potential future valuation of $7 trillion, despite setbacks with China and intensifying competition from AMD.

What Nvidia Has That Competitors Can Only Dream Of

Future-Readiness

Nvidia’s decision to repurpose its graphics chips for AI was nothing short of visionary. Recognizing that the parallel processing architecture originally designed for rendering complex graphics was also perfectly suited for the intense computational demands of AI – marked a pivotal turning point and redefined the company’s future.

CUDA Platform

The introduction of the Compute Unified Device Architecture in 2006 is Nvidia’s most significant differentiator. CUDA provided software tools that allowed developers to program Nvidia GPUs for general computing tasks beyond graphics. Thus Nvidia built a robust software ecosystem around its hardware. This early move created a durable competitive moat, fostering developer loyalty and driving long-term platform adoption. It meant that researchers and developers building AI models were already accustomed to Nvidia’s software and hardware long before the AI boom truly kicked off, positioning Nvidia as the default choice for AI infrastructure.

Holistic Approach To AI Infrastructure

Unlike its competition, Nvidia focuses on building the entire AI infrastructure. Its end-to-end AI platform encompassing GPUs, CPUs, networking hardware, and full-stack software gives it the capability to build AI supercomputers, while enabling customers to deploy AI with greater ROI.

Rapid Innovation Cycle

Nvidia’s ability to deliver new GPU architectures with significant performance gains — such as Ampere, Hopper and Blackwell — has kept it consistently ahead of the curve. The company’s rapid iteration has made it the go-to provider for customers racing to keep pace with the computing demands of generative AI and large language models.

Financials Backing The Narrative

Nvidia’s financials have been growing at a faster pace in recent fiscal years, leading to the sharp rise in its share price. Revenues have grown from $26.97 billion in fiscal 2023 to $60.92 billion in fiscal 2024 and to $130.5 billion in fiscal 2025. The growth in revenue has been accompanied by strong profitability. Operating income has grown from $4.2 billion in fiscal 2023 to $32.9 billion in fiscal 2024 to $81.5 billion in fiscal 2025 and earnings per share from $0.17 in fiscal 2023 to $1.19 in fiscal 2024 and to $2.94 in fiscal 2025.

Resilience In The Face Of Headwinds

Nvidia has shown remarkable resilience, enduring the 2022 crypto crash that severely impacted its gaming segment and the current US-China trade tensions. China has been a key market for Nvidia; it represented $17 billion or 13% of Nvidia’s sales for the fiscal year that ended in January. But Nvidia’s market share in the region has weakened from 95% before 2022 to just 50% after U.S. regulators tightened restrictions on selling high-end AI chips to China over national security concerns. Instead of resisting policy constraints, Nvidia adjusted swiftly by introducing the H20, a watered-down version of its H100 GPU designed for U.S. compliance — demonstrating its agility in navigating complex regulations. With China turning away from its chips now, Nvidia is accelerating expansion into new markets, again highlighting its resourcefulness.

Founder CEO Advantage

Huang’s leadership remains Nvidia’s greatest asset. The visionary chief executive touted the transformational potential of AI long before it went mainstream and prepared Nvidia to be at the heart of the AI buildout boom. As a founder-CEO, he brings continuity, long-term strategic vision and assertiveness to steer Nvidia through a complex technological and geopolitical situation.

Huang’s pragmatic leadership has been on display repeatedly: He lobbied effectively to ease U.S. restrictions on H20 chip exports, yet accepted China’s subsequent rejection of Nvidia’s H20 and RTX Pro 6000D chips with composure. Chinese regulators have reportedly directed companies like Alibaba and ByteDance to cancel orders for Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D processors, which are specifically designed to comply with U.S. export rules and serve the Chinese market. Instead of dwelling on the setback, Nvidia shifted strategy — assuming a “China zero” baseline in financial guidance and treating any China-related sales as potential upside rather than expectation.

The recent U.S. approval to sell AI chips to the UAE drove Nvidia stock to new highs, and a deal to sell directly to OpenAI, bypassing traditional cloud partners — reflects the company’s evolving sales strategy. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s strategic investment in Intel points to initiatives to diversify manufacturing sources beyond TSMC, as Taiwan faces an ongoing geopolitical threat of invasion from China. This proactive de-risking underscores Huang’s forward-looking approach that continues to set Nvidia apart.

What Does The Future Of Nvidia Look Like?

Nvidia still has a long growth runway extending into the next decade. Last month, Nvidia unveiled Rubin CPX, a new class of GPU designed to handle million-token coding and generative video applications. Rubin CPX is offered in multiple configurations, including the Vera Rubin NVL144 CPX , which Nvidia says will enable companies to generate $5 billion in token revenue for every $100 million invested. Rubin is on schedule for volume production next year.

Over the next five years, Nvidia expects to scale into a $3-4 trillion AI infrastructure opportunity with its Blackwell, Rubin and other successors. The AI infrastructure market continues to expand significantly with $600 billion in data center and computing-power investments expected this year. The key drivers for these investments include reasoning agentic AI that would require a lot of computing power, global build outs for sovereign AI, enterprise AI adoption, and the arrival of robotics and physical AI.

Blackwell has set industry benchmarks for AI inference ROI. As agentic and reasoning-based models gain traction, inference workloads are scaling across sectors, positioning Blackwell as a core growth engine. Nvidia claims that its Blackwell platform delivers the highest ROI at AI factory scale and can generate $75 million in token revenue over three years from a $5 million investment. Token revenue is earned during an AI system’s inference phase, where it processes input tokens and generates output tokens to produce responses. The faster and more efficiently it handles each token, the greater the potential revenue the system can generate.

Nvidia’s RTX Pro servers enable enterprises to build AI factories and accelerate enterprise workloads from agentic AI and LLM inference to industrial AI and digital twins. About 90 companies have already adopted RTX Pro servers, including Hitachi, which uses these for real-time simulation and digital twins, Lilly for drug discovery, Hyundai for factory design and AV validation and Disney for immersive storytelling. RTX Pro servers are expected to become a multibillion-dollar product line as enterprises modernize data centers.

Sovereign AI has emerged as a growth pillar, as nations seek to build in-country AI infrastructure using Nvidia’s full-stack. Nvidia is working on Sovereign AI initiatives across The UK and Europe.

The European Union plans to invest €20 billion to establish 20 AI factories in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, including five gigafactories to increase its AI infrastructure tenfold.

Isambard-AI, deemed as the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer, is powered by Nvidia. This supercomputer aims to accelerate breakthroughs in fields of drug discovery and climate modeling.

Nvidia expects to achieve over $20 billion in sovereign AI revenue this year, more than twice its revenue last year.

Networking, which is shaping up as a critical contributor for Nvidia, fetched second quarter revenues of $7.3 billion, up 98% year-on-year and up 46% sequentially. Strong demand across Spectrum X Ethernet, InfiniBand, and NVLink spurred the strong growth. Spectrum X, which is the world’s first Ethernet networking platform for AI, is now annualizing over $10 billion in revenue, accelerating from an $8 billion annual run rate in the first quarter.

THOR, Nvidia’s new robotics computing platform is seeing early adoption from leading players like Meta, Amazon Robotics, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar, Figure, Hexagon and Medtronic. Robotic applications require exponentially more computing power and infrastructure, representing a significant long-term demand driver for Nvidia’s data center platform.

Last but not the least, Nvidia’s near-term outlook looks upbeat. It sees third-quarter revenues of $54 billion, plus or minus 2% – implying a range of $52.9 billion to $55.1 billion compared to the consensus of $53.1 billion. This is higher than the $46.7 billion in revenues it generated for the second quarter. The outlook assumes no H20 shipments to China.

So, does Nvidia look like it’s slowing down?

Nvidia Valuation: Record High Prices Still Suggest Upside Potential

Even at record highs, Nvidia’s stock may not be as overvalued as it appears. Several valuation metrics suggest there’s still room for upside:

PEG Ratio: Nvidia’s forward PEG of 1.11 represents a 38% discount to the sector median of 1.79, and is 34% below its own five-year average of 1.68.EV/EBITDA: Both trailing and forward EV/EBITDA multiples are trading at a 30% and 26% discount, respectively, to the five-year average.Price/Cash Flow: The TTM multiple is 22% below, and the forward multiple is 14% below, their respective five-year averages.

These metrics suggest that, despite its impressive run-up, Nvidia stock may still be undervalued relative to its historical and sector benchmarks.

Is Nvidia Stock Still A Buy After Its Spectacular 5-Year Rally?

Nvidia stock isn’t trading on hype The market is pricing in its AI leadership and perhaps even under-pricing the scale of its opportunity. Despite a hefty $4.4 trillion market cap, Nvidia remains deeply embedded in the multitrillion-dollar AI infrastructure cycle that continues to unfold. Nvidia isn’t some accessory to AI buildout, it is the backbone of the process.

The company’s financial results continue to validate this growth narrative, with sustained momentum across key segments. Competition from AMD cannot be brushed off, but Nvidia’s full-stack advantage remains difficult to replicate.

China is a near-term setback, but Nvidia is already expanding into other international markets. Nvidia’s dominance in data centers, sovereign AI initiatives and enterprise AI point to a multi-year growth runway. The recent dip in Nvidia stock presents a buying opportunity, in my opinion.

Bottom Line

Despite a nearly 1,200% surge over the past five years, Nvidia’s growth shows no signs of fatigue. No stock, including Nvidia, has a straight upward trajectory and periods of volatility are inevitable. However, pullbacks in Nvidia stock could offer attractive entry points for investors with a long-term view. As the buildout of AI infrastructure continues to accelerate, Nvidia stock appears well-positioned to set new highs.

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