NVIDIA's runaway gains
- Commentators pointed out NVIDIA has surged roughly 1,580% since 2022 while the S&P gained about 50%. - The specific outperformance cited was +1,580% for NVIDIA since 2022 versus S&P +50%. - That performance and a noted NVIDIA/Google collaboration boosted sentiment around AI infrastructure beneficiaries. (x.com (x.com))
Nvidia’s stock has outpaced almost every corner of the U.S. market since 2022, turning an artificial-intelligence chip supplier into a nearly $5 trillion company. (google.com, stockanalysis.com) As of April 22, 2026, Nvidia shares were trading around $200, up from split-adjusted levels near $12 at the start of 2022, a gain of roughly 1,580%. The S&P 500, the index of 500 large U.S. companies, showed a three-year return of 36.95% as of April 21, 2026, and broader total-return calculations put the gain since the start of 2022 at a little above 50%. (finance.yahoo.com, spglobal.com, officialdata.org) The move has tracked Nvidia’s shift from a graphics-chip company into the main hardware supplier for artificial-intelligence data centers. Nvidia reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $215.9 billion on February 25, 2026, up 65% from a year earlier, with data-center revenue of $62.3 billion in the latest quarter. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) That business sells the processors and networking gear used to train and run large AI models, the software systems behind chatbots, image generators, and automated coding tools. Nvidia said in its February earnings release that its data-center business has scaled nearly 13-fold since fiscal 2023. (nvidianews.nvidia.com, s201.q4cdn.com) Investors have also treated Nvidia as a read-through for the companies building the rest of the AI stack: cloud landlords, power suppliers, cooling vendors, memory makers, and server assemblers. Standard & Poor’s says the S&P 500 covers about 80% of U.S. market capitalization, but Nvidia’s rise has been large enough to dominate index performance and market leadership on its own. (spglobal.com, companiesmarketcap.com) Google has helped reinforce that trade by expanding its infrastructure partnership with Nvidia. Google Cloud said on March 16, 2026 that it was adding more Nvidia-based offerings, including G4 virtual machines powered by Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and upcoming support for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 platform. (cloud.google.com) The two companies had already widened their tie-up a year earlier. Nvidia said on March 18, 2025 that Alphabet and Google would adopt new Nvidia systems for cloud and research workloads, while Nvidia would become the first industry partner to use Google DeepMind’s SynthID watermarking technology. (investor.nvidia.com) The stock’s headline percentage gains also reflect a 10-for-1 split that took effect on June 10, 2024, which lowered the per-share price without changing the company’s underlying value. Nvidia’s investor FAQ said the split increased the quarterly cash dividend on a pre-split basis from $0.04 to $0.10 per share, equal to $0.01 after the split. (investor.nvidia.com, s201.q4cdn.com) At roughly $4.9 trillion in market value on April 22, 2026, Nvidia is no longer just an AI stock. It has become the market’s clearest bet that demand for the chips, servers, and power-hungry data centers behind AI will keep rising. (stockanalysis.com, cloud.google.com)
