Nvidia tops S&P 500 with 15,332% gain over the last decade

Put it this way: if you had put $10,000 into Nvidia a decade ago and done absolutely nothing, you would be sitting on roughly $1.5 million today. That is not a typo. Nvidia posted approximately 15,333% in total returns over the past ten years, a figure that lands it firmly at the top of every S&P 500 performance ranking ever assembled. The driver is no secret. Nvidia builds the graphics processing units that power the AI infrastructure buildout, both for training large language models and for running inference workloads at scale. How dominant is “dominant”? In 2025 alone, Nvidia accounted for roughly 15.5% of the S&P 500’s total return of 17.9%. In English: nearly one out of every six dollars the index made last year came from a single company. Nvidia’s market weighting inside the S&P 500 sits at approximately 7.94% to 8%, making it one of the heaviest anchors in the entire index. The decade-long climb traces back to a pivot that looked risky at the time. Nvidia was originally a gaming GPU company, the kind of hardware that let teenagers run first-person shooters at high frame rates. Then the machine learning community discovered that the same parallel processing archit...