30 May 2023: Nvidia joins the trillion-dollar club
On May 30, 2023 Nvidia's market value briefly topped $1 trillion, making it the first chipmaker to reach the mark. A week earlier it had stunned Wall Street with a revenue forecast far above expectations, driven by demand for its AI chips. A company once known mainly for gaming graphics cards had become the essential supplier of the AI boom, and the rally was only beginning.
The lesson: Picks-and-shovels businesses can win big in a boom without needing to pick which customers succeed.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Nvidia at the start of 2020 → $30,833 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is 30.8 times the money, and $28,741 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Nvidia teaches: Optionality is easy to undervalue: a niche capability like CUDA sat in Nvidia's results for years before it suddenly became worth more than the core business.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $0.5 | $370,000 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $5.00 | $37,000 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $6.00 | $30,833 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Nvidia? Every starting year and the full story →
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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