Looking back from the vantage point of January 2026, few moments in financial history carry the same weight as May 22, 2024. On that day, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) didn’t just report earnings; it fundamentally re-indexed the global economy. By posting a record fiscal first-quarter revenue of $26.04 billion—a staggering 262% jump from the previous year—NVIDIA effectively silenced skeptics who questioned the longevity of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) "gold rush." The announcement of a 10-for-1 stock split on that same day served as a psychological masterstroke, democratizing access to the era’s most valuable asset and setting the stage for the company’s climb toward a $5 trillion market capitalization.

The immediate implications were profound. NVIDIA’s Datacenter division, the heart of the generative AI revolution, delivered $22.6 billion in revenue alone, up 427% year-over-year. This wasn't merely a corporate win; it was a structural shift. The results proved that the world's largest enterprises and sovereign nations were no longer just "experimenting" with AI—they were rebuilding their entire digital foundations on NVIDIA’s Hopper architecture. As the stock split made shares more palatable to retail investors in June 2024, NVIDIA’s gravity began to pull the entire SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA: SPY) upward, eventually accounting for more than a third of the index’s total gains in the first half of that year.

The Blowout Report and the Split Heard 'Round the World

The May 2024 earnings call was a masterclass in visionary leadership by CEO Jensen Huang. The headline figure—$26.04 billion in revenue—shattered the $24.65 billion consensus estimate, but the underlying metrics were even more startling. Non-GAAP gross margins expanded to a record 78.9%, a level of profitability rarely seen in hardware at such scale. Huang famously declared that the world was at the "start of the next industrial revolution," where data centers were becoming "AI factories" producing a new commodity: intelligence.

To sustain this momentum and reward its growing legion of investors, NVIDIA announced a 10-for-1 forward stock split, effective June 7, 2024. At the time, shares were trading above $1,000, creating a high barrier to entry for smaller investors. The split reduced the price to roughly $100 per share, which sparked a massive "sympathy rally" and increased liquidity. Furthermore, the company hiked its quarterly dividend by 150%, a signal of supreme confidence in its cash flow. The market responded with a 4% surge in after-hours trading, pushing NVIDIA past the $3 trillion valuation mark for the first time shortly thereafter.

The Ecosystem Ripple: Winners and Losers in the Blackwell Wake

The shockwaves from NVIDIA’s Q1 results created a clear divide between those who integrated with the "Green Team" and those who stood in its path. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) emerged as the quintessential winner. As the sole foundry for NVIDIA’s H100 and subsequent Blackwell chips, TSMC saw its stock jump 12% following the report. By early 2026, TSMC’s role as the indispensable partner has only deepened, with the foundry raising its capital expenditure to over $50 billion to accommodate NVIDIA’s relentless product cycle. Similarly, Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI) and ARM Holdings (NASDAQ: ARM) rode NVIDIA’s coattails, with SMCI’s liquid-cooled rack solutions and ARM’s architecture becoming standard components in the high-density data centers of 2025.

Conversely, the "legacy" giants faced an identity crisis. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) became the most visible casualty of the "CPU-to-GPU" transition. As NVIDIA’s datacenter revenue soared, Intel’s core server business felt the chill of obsolescence, forcing the company into a painful restructuring. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD), while performing better than Intel, found itself in a perpetual game of catch-up. Despite launching its MI300 series to strong demand, AMD struggled to breach NVIDIA’s "software moat"—the CUDA platform—which has kept developers locked into NVIDIA’s ecosystem through early 2026.

Driving the Benchmark: NVIDIA as the S&P 500’s North Star

By mid-2024, NVIDIA’s influence on the broader market had reached unprecedented levels. Financial analysts noted that NVIDIA alone was responsible for approximately 35% of the S&P 500's total returns during the first six months of 2024. This concentration of market power drew comparisons to the dot-com era, but with a critical difference: NVIDIA had the earnings to back up the valuation. While the 1990s were built on "eyes on pages" and "clicks," the 2020s AI boom was built on hard, high-margin hardware sales to trillion-dollar companies like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META).

The transition from general-purpose computing to accelerated computing became the dominant industry trend. This wasn't just a tech story; it was a macroeconomic one. Governments began investing in "Sovereign AI," building domestic compute capacity to ensure national security and economic competitiveness. This trend, highlighted by Huang during the May 2024 call, opened up a new multi-billion dollar revenue stream from countries like Japan, France, and Singapore, insulating NVIDIA from the potential spending plateaus of Silicon Valley's "Hyperscalers."

The Path to 2026: From Blackwell to Vera Rubin

As we navigate through January 2026, the NVIDIA story has moved into its next act. The Blackwell chip cycle, which followed the historic Q1 2025 report, became the fastest-ramping product in semiconductor history. However, the road wasn't without bumps. In early 2025, the "DeepSeek Shock"—a breakthrough from a Chinese AI firm that optimized high-level reasoning on cheaper hardware—temporarily wiped $600 billion off NVIDIA's market cap as investors feared the end of the "compute-at-any-cost" era.

Yet, the market quickly realized that "Agentic AI" and new reasoning models actually required more inference power, not less. At the start of 2026, NVIDIA is now transitioning to its Vera Rubin architecture, which promises five times the inference performance of Blackwell. The company has successfully pivoted from being a chip vendor to a "full-stack" data center company, selling everything from networking (Spectrum-X) to software (NIMs). The focus for 2026 has shifted toward "Physical AI"—the use of NVIDIA chips to power humanoid robotics and autonomous factories—a market that analysts believe could eventually eclipse the LLM (Large Language Model) boom.

The Verdict: A Legacy of Dominance

The May 2024 earnings report remains a landmark because it proved that AI was not a bubble, but a foundational shift in how the world calculates. NVIDIA’s ability to maintain 70%+ gross margins while scaling revenue at triple-digit rates is a feat that may never be repeated in the hardware sector. The 10-for-1 stock split was the moment NVIDIA transitioned from a specialized semiconductor play to a "common stock" staple held in nearly every retail and institutional portfolio.

Moving forward, investors must keep a close eye on two critical factors: geopolitical tensions and the "ROI hurdle." As China continues to find ways around export restrictions and as the U.S. government considers further curbs, NVIDIA’s international revenue remains its largest wildcard. Furthermore, as the massive capex from 2024 and 2025 begins to hit the balance sheets of tech giants, the pressure to show tangible AI-driven revenue will intensify. For now, however, NVIDIA remains the undisputed architect of the modern world, with its "Rubin" era poised to push the boundaries of intelligence even further.

This content is intended for informational purposes only and is not financial advice.