Nvidia is still posting record revenue, but its stock has lost some of the shine investors have grown used to. According to The Motley Fool (as republished by Yahoo Finance), the artificial-intelligence chipmaker's shares are up 12% in 2026 — enough to barely beat the S&P 500 index, but a far cry from the outsized returns that made Nvidia a Wall Street sensation.
That gap between blockbuster fundamentals and a muted stock price is the heart of the story. The Motley Fool notes that investors "have been conditioned to expect monster returns" from Nvidia, and this year's more modest performance suggests those expectations may be resetting.
The near-term picture has also been choppy. According to GuruFocus, Nvidia shares declined even after strong earnings from Google parent Alphabet — a report that would normally be read as good news for Nvidia, since Alphabet is a major buyer of AI computing power.
Analysts still see room to grow. According to a report carried by AOL, Bank of America has pointed to a potential next "$170 billion growth engine" for Nvidia, and said Alphabet's earnings strengthened the assumption that demand for faster GPUs, larger computing clusters, and more cloud spending will keep flowing.
Why it matters: Nvidia has become a bellwether for the entire AI trade, so when its stock stalls even as revenue hits records, it raises a question that reaches well beyond one company — whether Wall Street's enormous expectations for AI have finally caught up with reality.