Nvidia (NVDA 1.26%) is the most valuable company in the world as of this writing, with a market cap of $3.4 trillion, and it has reached this position thanks to a tremendous rally of more than 1,500% in its stock price in the past five years.
Investors will now be wondering if Nvidia has the potential to deliver more upside over the next five years following this phenomenal run. However, don't be surprised to see this semiconductor giant's shares jump higher and attain a $6 trillion valuation by the end of the decade. Let's take a closer look at the factors that could help Nvidia hit that milestone by 2030.
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Nvidia's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered growth remains solid
Robust demand for Nvidia's AI chips has been the biggest reason behind the stock's terrific surge in recent years. The good part is that Nvidia continues to generate a massive amount of revenue from its AI chip business despite tackling headwinds such as export restrictions to key markets like China.
This was evident from Nvidia's latest results for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 (which ended on April 27). The company's revenue shot up 69% year over year to $44.1 billion during the quarter, even though it lost $2.5 billion in revenue in fiscal Q1, owing to the restrictions on sales of its chips to China. The chipmaker also incurred a $4.5 billion inventory charge to write down the value of chips that were intended for the Chinese market.
Moreover, Nvidia's fiscal Q2 revenue would take an $8 billion hit on account of the China-related restrictions. But the good part is that the company's guidance for the current quarter still calls for a 50% year-over-year increase in revenue, while its earnings are expected to increase by 44% despite anticipated loss in Chinese revenue.
CEO Jensen Huang admitted on Nvidia's latest earnings conference call that the $50 billion Chinese market is now effectively closed to U.S. players such as Nvidia. Even then, analysts have increased their revenue estimates.
NVDA Revenue Estimates for Current Fiscal Year data by YCharts
That's not surprising, as Nvidia still has a massive sales opportunity in AI chips beyond the Chinese market. It is now entering new markets such as Saudi Arabia to build AI factories "powered by several hundred thousand of Nvidia's most advanced GPUs over the next five years," according to the company. Additionally, massive AI infrastructure projects such as Stargate, from which Nvidia has started benefiting already, could help it mitigate the lost opportunity in China.
Management consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that AI-capable data centers could require investments worth a whopping $5.2 trillion by 2030 to build enough computing power to handle training and inference workloads. So investors would do well to look past the China-related problems that Nvidia is currently facing, as the broader opportunity in the AI data center market should be lucrative enough to help the chipmaker keep growing at a healthy pace for the next five years.
Moreover, Nvidia is showing no signs of losing its grip over the AI chip market. Its data center revenue shot up an impressive 73% year over year to $39 billion in the previous quarter. That was miles ahead of Broadcom's $4 billion AI revenue and AMD's $3.7 billion data center sales in the previous quarter, the two chipmakers that are considered to be the closest to Nvidia in the AI chip race.
Nvidia's data center growth was higher than the 57% growth recorded by AMD in this segment and close to the 77% growth in Broadcom's AI revenue, even though it has a much larger revenue base. This is a testament to just how popular Nvidia's AI chips are, with the company's latest generation of Blackwell processors already a major hit among cloud computing giants within two quarters of hitting the market.
Even better, Nvidia has moved past just selling AI hardware. It also offers access to models that help customers train and deploy AI agents, along with other enterprise AI applications that allow customers to improve the efficiency of their large language models (LLMs). Its enterprise platforms are gaining traction in diverse industries such as cybersecurity and restaurants where companies are deploying Nvidia's solutions to streamline their operations or to build agentic AI applications.
All this indicates that investors shouldn't miss the forest for the trees, as Nvidia's long-term prospects aren't dependent on just China. There is still a lot of room for growth in the AI chip market, and the company's diversification into other areas such as enterprise AI applications and automotive should be enough to power remarkable growth over the next five years.
The path to a $6 trillion valuation
Nvidia is currently trading at 23 times sales. While that's three times the U.S. technology sector's average price-to-sales ratio, the company's dominant position in AI chips, the prospects of this market, and the other catalysts that are coming into play help justify that valuation.
We have already seen in the chart that Nvidia's top line is expected to jump to $292 billion in three years. If it maintains its sales multiple at that time, it will be able to easily surpass a $6 trillion valuation in just three years, representing a big jump from current levels.
However, if we assume Nvidia's top-line growth slows after fiscal 2028 to an annual rate of 15% in fiscal 2029 and 2030 from the 31% compound annual growth rate that it is forecast to clock between fiscal 2026 and 2028 (using fiscal 2025 revenue of $130.5 billion as the base), its annual revenue could jump to $386 billion after five years.
If Nvidia trades at a discounted 15 times sales at that time, it could still hit a $6 trillion valuation by 2030. So, investors can still consider buying this AI stock in anticipation of more upside in the long run, as it seems capable of maintaining its healthy growth rate over the next five years.
