Nvidia (NVDA 1.13%) wowed investors over the past five years, soaring a mind-boggling 1,500%. The company delivered this top performance thanks to its dominance in one of today's most exciting and high-growth fields -- artificial intelligence (AI) -- a market expected to grow from about $200 billion right now to more than $1 trillion by the end of the decade.

Quarter after quarter, Nvidia has delivered double-digit and triple-digit revenue growth to record levels in the billions of dollars and also has been highly profitable on sales. The company sells the world's fastest graphics processing units (GPUs), or chips that power crucial AI tasks, along with an entire portfolio of related products and services. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, in a BG2 podcast last fall, even referred to the company as the "on ramp" to anything AI, and his company serves players from start-ups to market giants like Microsoft and Amazon.

All of this has kept the share-price momentum going up -- until recently. Nvidia shares slipped back in January after news from start-up DeepSeek prompted investors to question the need for Nvidia's most expensive chips, and in recent days, uncertainty as to how the government's policies will impact the economy have continued to weigh on the shares. The stock now is down more than 13% year to date.

It's fair to ask this question: Are Nvidia's market-beating gains over? The evidence is piling up, and here's what it shows.

Image source: Getty Images.

Triple-digit revenue growth

First, though, it's important to consider Nvidia's market position today. Thanks to the top performance of Nvidia's GPUs, the company holds an 80% share of the AI chip market. The complete offering of solutions, from networking to software, means Nvidia can accompany customers along their entire AI development and use paths. In the recent full year, this translated into triple-digit revenue growth to a record of more than $130 billion. And profitability remained high, with gross margin surpassing 70%.

What are some of the negative points that have weighed on the stock in recent times?

DeepSeek's announcement that it had trained a model for only $6 million on lower-cost Nvidia chips sparked concern that Nvidia's customers may cut their AI budgets and try to do the same. Major technology companies have been spending billions of dollars annually on AI, and much of that is directed to Nvidia for the purchase of GPUs to power the training and inferencing of models.

Nvidia dispelled most of the concerns. The chip giant explained the need for high-powered GPUs for one of the next stages of AI growth -- reasoning inference, or the "thinking" process that leads to models solving complex problems. On top of this, it quickly became clear that tech giants haven't abandoned AI spending and continue to pile into Nvidia's top offerings.

Nvidia faces two headwinds

Two remaining headwinds, though, are the government's export controls on AI chips to China, which have reduced Nvidia's sales there, and the U.S. rollout of tariffs on imported goods from China, Canada, and Mexico. Nvidia said during its recent earnings call that sales in China are half of the levels prior to the launch of export controls back in 2022. Though tech companies have asked the Trump administration to rethink the policy, Bloomberg recently reported that the president may actually toughen the restrictions.

As for the tariffs on imports, they could result in higher manufacturing costs for companies like Nvidia that manufacture products outside of the U.S. Some economists have warned that the tariffs may lead to rising inflation and a longer high-interest-rate environment. All of these uncertainties could put the brakes on Nvidia's stock performance in the near term.

Soaring demand for Nvidia's products

At the same time, though, it's important to remember that Nvidia's business is going strong, with soaring demand for its products, a fantastic rollout of its new Blackwell architecture, and even more powerful platforms coming soon. As mentioned, recent earnings came in at record levels, and Nvidia said Blackwell brought in $11 billion in revenue during its first quarter on the market. Demand for the product continues to be "extraordinary," Huang says, so there's reason to be optimistic about it generating more growth in the coming quarters.

Later this year, Nvidia plans to release Blackwell Ultra, followed by the next-generation Rubin architecture, fulfilling its promise to upgrade its GPUs on an annual basis. Huang suggested he would offer exciting details about these new products at the company's annual GTC AI conference on March 18. Any positive news could offer Nvidia stock a lift.

What does the evidence tell us about Nvidia's share-price performance ahead? Nvidia's market-beating days surely aren't over, even if the stock stalls in the near term over certain economic uncertainties and headwinds. Over time, Nvidia's market leadership, innovation, and ability to manage its costs should support earnings growth. (Remember, the company has maintained gross margin above 70% even during an expensive product launch phase.)

All of this means it's a great idea to buy Nvidia on the dip and hold for the long term. This way, you could potentially benefit from another wave of explosive stock performance.