By Will Ebiefung
Publication Date: 2025-12-19 19:45:00
The generative AI boom is getting a little long in the tooth.
2025 has been a banner year for Nvidia (NVDA +3.93%) investors. Shares in the AI hardware titan have soared by 32% this year, trouncing the S&P 500‘s comparatively measly return of just 15%.
That said, the generative artificial intelligence (AI) hardware boom is getting long in the tooth, leaving investors wondering if Nvidia can maintain its momentum in 2026.
Let’s dig deeper to see what the future may bring for the stock.
Image source: Getty Images.
Nvidia is still a fantastic company
With a market cap of $4.3 trillion, Nvidia is the largest company in the world, and it didn’t get to this point by accident. The chipmaker’s continued success has relied on its ability to create a deep economic moat in an industry with a fair bit of competition. For the most part, this edge relies on Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), which is Nvidia’s proprietary software platform designed to allow developers to get the most out of its graphics processing units (GPUs).
Nvidia has been a pioneer in GPU technology since its founding in 1993. And this means a whole generation of developers has been trained on CUDA. It now boasts a vast ecosystem of tools and user knowledge that has given Nvidia a practically unassailable moat in its niche, even if products from rivals like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) can deliver similar raw specs.
The generative AI boom allowed Nvidia to leverage the advantages it has been nurturing…