Nvidia (NVDA +1.30%) has become a symbol of the artificial intelligence (AI) trend, in addition to becoming the most valuable company in the world. It's ahead of the second largest, Apple, by an amount that's more than the market cap of all but the largest 15 or so publicly traded businesses. However, large companies can quickly gain or lose what looks like a lot of market cap fairly quickly, since those amounts represent a smaller percentage of the whole.
For example, Nvidia became the first company to break through the $5 trillion level last year, but it's down about 5% from its peak, and worth $4.8 trillion today.
The market seems uncertain about what's next for the AI giant in the near term. But could it reach a market cap of $10 trillion by 2030?
Image source: Nvidia.
How high can Nvidia go?
The market has recently been pessimistic about Nvidia due to the extraordinary scale of hyperscalers' spending. Amazon, Meta Platforms, Alphabet, and Microsoft sent shockwaves through the markets when they announced their fiscal 2026 capital expenditure plans, which, combined, exceeded $600 billion. If the investment thesis for Nvidia rests on this kind of spending, and if those outlays don't actually pan out with sufficient returns, Nvidia's sales could slow down.
However, CEO Jensen Huang remains upbeat. He unveiled a slew of new innovations at the company's annual GTC conference last month, including a new platform that combines Groq and Vera Rubin chips and is 350 times faster than the Hopper generation, which preceded the current Blackwell platform. He expects to sell $1 trillion worth of processors from the Blackwell and Vera Rubin lines in 2026 and 2027. Its current revenue run rate is $272 billion, but analysts are anticipating accelerating sales growth of 79% in the current quarter and 85% in the next quarter.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
The path to $1 trillion
Typically, when I run different scenarios about companies' futures, my assumption is that revenue growth will begin to decelerate on a percentage basis, especially as a company gets much bigger. But Nvidia's sales growth is picking up instead of slowing down. If it remains elevated, it won't take long for the top line to double.
Nvidia stock currently trades at a price-to-sales ratio of 21, which is high on an absolute basis. However, if its sales growth stays high, it can maintain that ratio, and the stock could rise as fast as the company's sales do, in which case, it could reach a $1 trillion market cap well before 2030. However, even if its top-line growth starts to slow down, and the price-to-sales ratio moderates, there's a good chance the stock -- and the market cap -- will double by 2030.
