Most of us get Christmas gifts that are either sentimental or practical. Stocking stuffers tend to range from gift cards and gadgets to corny holiday-themed sweaters. But just imagine if you’d unwrapped $10,000 worth of Nvidia (NVDA) stock last December instead of a nice pair of socks.
That wouldn’t just be a lovely gift. It would be a gift that keeps on giving.
Nvidia is riding high on the back of the global artificial intelligence boom, and the company’s value has maintained a steady and impressive upward trajectory throughout the year.
So, how much would that gift be worth today? And more importantly, what does Nvidia’s performance in 2025 tell us about investor expectations moving into 2026?
Before we look at why this year was a watershed for Nvidia (and the entire semiconductor market), let’s crunch the numbers.
Nvidia’s shares were trading in the neighborhood of $140 each last Christmas. That means an initial $10,000 investment would have bagged you about 71.4 shares.
Now, fast-forward to December 2025. Nvidia’s rally hasn’t slowed down. The company continues to beat earnings forecasts and remains dominant in the AI sector. The market is loving it.
On Monday morning, Nvidia’s shares were trading at $180.99. That would make your 71.4 shares from last year worth just over $12,922. You’re looking at a 29% gain.
OK: That’s nothing like the rally Nvidia saw in 2024, and it doesn’t compare with the run we’ve seen from fellow AI wunderkind Palantir (PLTR) this year. But 29% is still nothing to scoff at, right?
The truth is Nvidia’s 2025 rally hasn’t been a smooth journey.
This has generally been a good year for Nvidia investors. But 2025 wasn’t without its ups and downs.
In 2024, the company executed a split that made its shares a lot more accessible to retail investors. But that liquidity didn’t just boost accessibility. It also expanded Nvidia’s investor base and created extra demand for shares. That meant less free float and more upward pressure on its share prices.
Nvidia’s sales teams were also dealing with high demand.
Every corporation wants a taste of AI right now. It’s become embedded in the infrastructure of enterprise computing, cloud services, and generative models everywhere. Over the past couple of years, Nvidia’s GPUs have emerged as the default hardware for a lot of large-scale models and inference workloads.
That’s why its revenues from data center sales eclipsed every other business segment in 2025, driving consecutive earnings beats and pushing Nvidia to become the world’s most valuable company (for a little while, anyway).
It seems like a lot of investors just treated Nvidia shares as a proxy for AI exposure in 2025. And that confidence was only increased when management initiated a buyback program.
But Nvidia’s been a victim of market volatility this year. That has more to do with speculation surrounding a broader AI bubble rather than the company’s fundamentals.
In November, price action saw some big pullbacks. Michael Burry bought almost $200 million in put options against Nvidia, and he’s not the only one betting against the company’s value. That’s why 2026 may be a make-or-break year for shareholders.
Now that 2025 is nearly in the rearview mirror, market chatter has already started for 2026. The key issue for Nvidia is the balance between AI adoption and saturation.
Everybody agrees that AI adoption is real. But many investors like Burry are now debating its breadth and pace. To maintain its value and sustain sales, Nvidia needs industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services to accelerate their GPU deployments. If growth shifts to software layers over hardware, Nvidia is likely to be hurt.
Then there’s competition dynamics. AI chip makers aren’t sitting still. If competitors generate meaningful gains, it’ll force Nvidia to accelerate its own R&D (or defend its pricing). The problem? Its margins are already under pressure.
High-growth companies tend to see expanding margins as they scale up. But sustained investment pushes costs higher, too. There’s a good chance retail investors will get tired of Nvidia’s steep run, and then the narrative could shift to profit-taking instead of accumulation.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a bearish signal, but it would be a significant rotation dynamic leading to more price volatility.
At the end of the day, a $10,000 Christmas gift of Nvidia stock in 2024 would have generated good tidings in the here and now. Nvidia wasn’t just hype in 2025, and the company delivered measurable growth over the last 12 months.
But looking ahead into the New Year, the picture is a little bit fuzzier. The sentiment for 2026 is one of cautious optimism because AI isn’t slowing down. But the competition in this space is huge, and a lot of big-time investors are already pricing Nvidia’s next chapter. They’re actively betting against Nvidia and the wider AI boom.
Only time will tell if those bets pay off, because right now Nvidia is still looking like the Christmas gift that keeps on giving.
On the date of publication, Nash Riggins did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Barchart.com