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The most talked about stock in the markets in the first half of 2024 was no doubt Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). During the first half, Nvidia's stock delivered a total return of 149.5%, including dividends, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Nvidia continued to ride a steady stream of optimism, as analysts and industry participants kept upping their estimates for artificial intelligence growth this year and beyond. In its two earnings releases, Nvidia not only lived up to heady expectations, but surpassed them. Furthermore, the company announced its new chip architecture slated for release later this year, adding to the excitement.

And as a cherry on top, the company also executed a stock split in June.

Nvidia posts mouth-watering growth

In its Q4 2024 earnings report in February and then its Q1 2025 earnings report in May, Nvidia trounced already-high analyst expectations for growth and profitability, with soaring revenues propelled by its data center segment for AI applications.

Data source: Nvidia press releases. YOY = year over year.

Nvidia was remarkably able to accelerate its data center revenue growth in Q1 of 2025, even though it was lapping the blockbuster quarter recorded in May 2023. Clearly, cloud companies and enterprises are falling all over themselves to buy Nvidia chips as they race to build the best and most accurate large language models.

Outside of financial releases, during the first half, Nvidia held its GTC Developer Conference in March, during which it unveiled its new Blackwell data center chip. Blackwell will be the successor to Hopper, which is Nvidia's current AI chip garnering so much interest.

Blackwell appeared to generate a lot of excitement, with CEO Jensen Huang boasting Blackwell packs 2.5 times the performance of Hopper for training applications, and between five and 30 times the performance for inference, depending on the networking technology and size of the GPU cluster.

Nvidia rose almost 150% in the first half of 2024. Image source: Getty Images.

After blockbuster earnings and the exciting announcement of Blackwell spurred increased analyst estimates for 2025, Nvidia decided to execute a 10-for-1 stock split on June 10. While splits don't increase or decrease the value of a company, it can potentially lure in retail investors or Nvidia employees that can't trade fractional shares in their brokerage accounts.

The split seemed to give Nvidia one final big push to become the most valuable company in the world on June 18, briefly surpassing Microsoft in market cap, before falling back into a close third place.

Where does Nvidia go from here?

After an historic multiyear run, it is hard to see how Nvidia can keep topping itself. Furthermore, its sky-high valuation now leaves it vulnerable to any setback, whether it's a slowdown in AI investment or new competitive threats.

However, none of that has shown up in the numbers to date, and companies appear to be continuing robust investment in the AI space as of now. Blackwell could keep the momentum going later this year, and a breakthrough in AI capabilities, perhaps artificial general intelligence (AGI), in the years ahead could very well keep Nvidia's stock going up and to the right. But a lot of good news is baked in now, so investors should remain extra cognizant of emerging news in the AI space.

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Billy Duberstein and/or his clients have positions in Microsoft. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Microsoft and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.