What if you bought Nvidia in 2000?
US Tech · Chips. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play2312.5× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Nvidia at the start of 2000 would be worth about $2,312,500 today — 2312.5 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Nvidia was founded in 1993 to make graphics chips for PC gamers and went public in 1999, winning the brutal early graphics card wars with its GeForce line. For most of the 2000s it was a respectable, cyclical chip company: the shares rose into 2007, then lost more than half in the financial crisis and spent years going nowhere. In 2006 it released CUDA, software that let its chips run general calculations, which at the time looked like an expensive side project.
That side project turned out to be the company. Researchers discovered GPUs were ideal for training neural networks, cryptocurrency miners bought them by the warehouse (and then stopped, causing a sharp slump in 2018), and data centres became a larger market than gaming. When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, Nvidia's chips were the scarce input of the AI boom, and in 2025 it became the first company valued at more than four trillion dollars. The jump from 2020 to 2026 alone was roughly thirtyfold.
The lesson: 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.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $0.08 | $2,312,500 | $4,626 | 2312.5× |
| 2003 | $0.1 | $1,850,000 | $7,727 | 1850.0× |
| 2005 | $0.2 | $925,000 | $5,763 | 925.0× |
| 2007 | $0.55 | $336,364 | $4,789 | 336.4× |
| 2008 | $0.85 | $217,647 | $4,626 | 217.6× |
| 2010 | $0.42 | $440,476 | $6,071 | 440.5× |
| 2012 | $0.35 | $528,571 | $5,312 | 528.6× |
| 2015 | $0.5 | $370,000 | $3,301 | 370.0× |
| 2018 | $5.00 | $37,000 | $2,519 | 37.0× |
| 2020 | $6.00 | $30,833 | $2,092 | 30.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2000, turning $1,000 into $2,312,500. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Nvidia is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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