Nvidia’s 85% GPU Market Share Faces Growing Competition: Is This AI Stock Still a Buy for 2026? | The Motley Fool

When you’re talking about the biggest stock market stories of 2025, Nvidia (NVDA +1.60%) is a name that keeps coming up. The company has been one of the biggest winners of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

The company’s hardware, its graphics processing units (GPUs), have become synonymous with AI. Many of the most advanced programs run on Nvidia chips — so many, in fact, that Nvidia has achieved a market share of 85%.

Nvidia is nearly a monopoly on its own with market control like that. But there are competitors emerging, namely Advanced Micro Devices (AMD +2.29%) and Qualcomm (QCOM 1.25%).

AMD holds 7% market share and growing, while Qualcomm has introduced some new chips aimed at lower-end AI users who don’t need the computing horsepower Nvidia’s chips are packing.

So, is Nvidia going to remain the leader of the AI hardware market? 

Heavy is the head that wears the crown

While there are many risks to being on top — the biggest one being that everyone is gunning for your spot — I don’t think Nvidia is at any risk of being toppled anytime soon.

Let’s start with the fact that even though AMD is growing its market share, it only grew by 0.8% in the third quarter of 2025 to hit 7%. So it is a rival, but a slow-growing rival.

While Qualcomm’s chips are sure to be a disruption in the market, one is due to come onto the market this year and the second in 2027….