Nvidia: A once-in-a-decade opportunity for growth investors

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) delivered spectacular gains for investors in the early stages of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. The company got into the market early, tailored its chips to suit AI, and became a market leader. Importantly, this translated into double- and triple-digit revenue growth, and the stock climbed more than 300% over three years.

Some investors have worried that, after such a performance, the company's better days may be in the rearview mirror. But that isn't necessarily the case. In fact, right now, Nvidia represents a once-in-a-decade opportunity for growth investors: This is as the company works to dominate the $200 billion central processing unit (CPU) market. Let's zoom in for a close look.

Nvidia's early growth

It's true that it was "easier" for Nvidia to post such tremendous earnings gains and stock performance in the earlier days of the AI story because the starting point was much lower. The following chart illustrates this.

But this doesn't mean the company will no longer deliver impressive growth. AI is in the early days of its rollout across real-world problems, and Nvidia's chips power this use of AI -- so demand for them should remain high, particularly considering Nvidia's focus on innovation. Nvidia updates its chips annually to ensure they remain the fastest and generate the highest levels of efficiency for customers.

The company dominates the AI chip market with its graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that fuel major tasks like the training and inference of models. And now Nvidia is tackling a new market, one that's worth $200 billion. This represents a once-in-a-decade opportunity for the company and for investors -- it offers you a fresh occasion to get in on Nvidia stock ahead of something big.

The CPU market

As mentioned above, this is the CPU space. CPUs are the standard chips that power computers, and as it turns out, they're the key chip involved in agentic AI. The use of AI agents -- the actual process of agents tackling problems on behalf of humans and taking action -- is seen as the next growth phase of AI. CPUs are needed to guide agents through their processes.

Nvidia is new to this space, but it's taking the market by storm. The company is launching its first stand-alone CPU this fall as part of its Vera Rubin platform and says it's on track for $20 billion in CPU sales this year. That's a lot of strength right out of the gate, offering us reason to be optimistic for the quarters to come. Nvidia also says it's on track to dominate in this market -- so the company may soon be the leader of the GPU and CPU markets.

This suggests that Nvidia stock could once again become a major winner for investors as this new growth opportunity takes shape.

Adria Cimino has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.