If you had invested $10,000 in Nvidia (NVDA 1.83%) on the day of its initial public offering in 1999 and never sold, you'd have a whopping $42.4 million today. Even if you had waited until 2015 to buy $10,000 of the stock and held on for the wild ride, your investment would be worth roughly $3.58 million now.
But, as the old saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. Can buying $10,000 of Nvidia stock still make you a millionaire?
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What it would take
Let's first address what it would take for a $10,000 investment in Nvidia to make you a millionaire. The math is simple: Since $1 million divided by $10,000 is 100, Nvidia would need to deliver a 100x gain.
Most stocks aren't able to produce that kind of return, even over a lifetime. However, Nvidia has done it in less than nine years.
Admittedly, it's hard to envision Nvidia doing it again. After all, the GPU maker now sports a market cap of over $4.2 trillion -- the highest valuation for any company ever. To turn $10,000 into $1 million, Nvidia's market cap would have to grow to a mind-blowing $420 trillion.
To put that figure into perspective, the U.S. GDP last year was roughly $29.2 trillion. The GDP for the entire world was around $110.5 trillion. All Nvidia would have to do to make you a millionaire with a $10,000 investment is to grow to 3.8 times the economic output of every country on the planet. Easy, peasy, right?
Potential scenarios
It's hard to envision how Nvidia could grow 100x. However, I can come up with two potential scenarios where it could at least theoretically happen.
The first scenario involves Nvidia achieving a revolutionary breakthrough that gives it a monopoly on technology that everyone wants. Maybe the company builds a teleportation device that allows people and products to be instantly transported anywhere.
Perhaps a more likely goal would be to create AI superintelligence, an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system that's smarter than any human who has ever lived. Nvidia has teamed up with partners, including Turing, who are trying to develop AGI systems. The company's GEAR group (GEAR stands for "generalist embodied agent research") is trying to build foundation models, agents, and robots that might eventually achieve AGI.
The second scenario requires time and consistently strong earnings growth. Nvidia's earnings jumped 31% year over year in the first quarter of 2025. Stock prices tend to track earnings growth over the long term. If we assume that Nvidia continues to grow by 31% for the next 17 or so years, its share price would increase by 100x. However, to deliver such stellar growth over such a long period, Nvidia might need a game-changing breakthrough mentioned in the first scenario.
Facing long odds
Is it possible that buying $10,000 of Nvidia stock right now could make you a millionaire? Sure. Is it probable? No way. The odds against Nvidia delivering a 100x gain are enormous. Of course, that's true for pretty much any other stock.
However, I suspect that Nvidia could still make investors millionaires. It'll just take more money and potentially a long time. If you want $10,000 to turn into $1 million, though, you might have to find a smaller stock with tremendous growth prospects -- in other words, another Nvidia of 10 to 20 years ago.
