By Adam Spatacco
Publication Date: 2026-01-19 21:30:00
The chipmaker rallied during the second half of 2025, but can it sustain its momentum in 2026?
When it comes to the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, no company is watched as closely as Nvidia (NVDA 0.29%). Over the last three years, the company’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and its CUDA computing platform have become central pillars supporting generative AI development.
Nvidia has become so influential in the AI realm that its quarterly earnings reports have essentially turned into a yardstick for the overall health of the technology industry. While shares of Nvidia have soared by roughly 1,000% since the AI revolution really took shape — making it the most valuable company in the world — the stock is doing something pretty interesting right now.
Image source: Nvidia.
Taking a trip down memory lane
You may recall that Nvidia got off to a rough start in 2025. Around this time last year, a Chinese start-up called DeepSeek debuted its R1 chatbot, which quickly emerged as a rival to popular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.
DeepSeek claimed to have trained its model using older, less powerful Nvidia GPUs, but it appeared competitive with the latest offerings from OpenAI and others. Because of this, investors started to wonder if demand for Nvidia’s new chip architectures would plateau or shrink.
Naturally, many investors bought into the narrative that AI developers might turn out not to need Nvidia’s next-generation products as much as had been…
