Up by about 26,000% over the past decade (as of this writing), Nvidia (NVDA -2.20%) has been a monster stock for investors. Its market capitalization has grown to about $3.5 trillion, making it one of the two most valuable companies in the world, neck-and-neck with Microsoft.

The stock's performance, meanwhile, has been well justified. The company's sales and earnings have grown explosively over that decade -- and particularly in the past few years as its graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the backbone of the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure build-out. The company's ongoing spectacular growth could be seen in its fiscal Q1 results: The $39.1 billion in data center revenue it booked was more than 9 times the $4.3 billion in data center revenue it generated in its Q1 just two years prior.