With a market cap of nearly $3 trillion, Nvidia (NVDA +4.30%) is now one of the most valuable companies in the world. Even after a recent pullback, it remains one of the largest of the "Magnificent Seven" stocks. According to new research from The Motley Fool, Nvidia has gone from "the smallest contributor to the Magnificent Seven, at just 0.8% of the combined value, to the second largest at 18.7%."
Since Nvidia supplies crucial components for artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that has caused huge upticks in cloud-computing demand in recent years, the chipmaker is majorly responsible for driving the substantial growth posted by the rest of the cohort in the Magnificent Seven, such as Microsoft.
Nvidia is an incredible business with robust demand, but is the stock still a buy even though so many investors are aware of this story? If you've been searching for high-potential growth stocks, keep reading -- it could be a perfect match for your portfolio.
Why Nvidia is king of the Magnificent Seven
One of my favorite Magnificent Seven stocks is Apple. Its rise has been playing out for decades, and the company has continued to evolve.
For a while, iPhone sales were the dominant contributor to the company's success. And that product remains its biggest moneymaker. But in recent years, the company has focused more on recurring, higher-margin revenue streams from its services segment.
This bucket includes iCloud subscriptions, App Store purchases, and many other intangible goods. Last quarter, services revenue reached $26.3 billion, a 13.9% rise year over year. iPhone sales, meanwhile, fell by 0.8% over the same period to $69.1 billion.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
Services revenue still pales in comparison to iPhone sales, but this would be missing the point. The former helps create stickiness for its hardware. The more that customers become enmeshed into Apple's ecosystem, the more they will continue to buy the products within that ecosystem -- a huge reason for its rise over the years.
Nvidia is arguably in an even more enviable position. The company's graphics processing units (GPUs) are crucial hardware needed to run and train AI models, operate cloud server infrastructure, enable modern video-game play, and much more.
In 2006, the company launched CUDA, a developer software suite that allowed end users to customize its GPUs for optimal performance. This was a stroke of genius. Today, many Nvidia chip purchasers have also set up custom environments for those chips to run on, creating a type of stickiness similar to Apple's.
So the chipmaker controls both the hardware and the software side of its GPUs. And right now, that competitive advantage is fueling a tremendous surge in demand for its products thanks to one industry in particular.
Time to buy this AI stock after the drop?
Since the year began, Nvidia shares have lost around 15% of their value, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off the company's market cap. If you're a believer in most AI market projections, you should be looking at this as a buying opportunity.
Demand for crucial components like Nvidia's GPUs is just starting to heat up -- a tailwind that could persist for decades. The consultancy McKinsey released a report last October that predicted AI software and services revenue would grow from $85 billion in 2022 to $1.5 trillion by 2040.
And that was just its bear case expectation. Its bull case called for AI revenue to hit $4.6 trillion by 2040.
All in all, this will be one of the largest growth opportunities in history. And thanks to its leading market share -- fueled by superior product development and its strategic vendor lock-in effects -- Nvidia is in the driver's seat for much of this growth.
Shares are expensive at 22.5 times sales, but if you're patient, holding Nvidia for the next decade or two will make this initial premium look like a bargain in hindsight. Expect significant volatility along the way, but it remains my favorite Magnificent Seven stock for long-term growth investors.
