R10,000 tech investment that became R4 million in 10 years

If you had invested R10,000 in Nvidia shares in early February 2015, the value of your investment would have grown to R4.04 million as of 6 February 2025, a MyBroadband analysis has shown.

Nvidia’s share price on the US stock exchange Nasdaq closed at $128.68 (R2,373) on Thursday, 6 February 2025.

The price was 25,131% higher than the closing price of $0.51 (R5.87) on 6 February 2015.

However, the actual increase in rand value was substantially higher at 40,324%, as the currency has weakened significantly over the past decade.

For reference, the rand went from trading at R11.51 per dollar in 2015 to R18.44 ten years later.

At the Nvidia share price and rand-dollar exchange rate on 6 February 2015, a R10,000 investment would have bought you 1,702.55 shares in Nvidia.

That investment would have grown to R4.04 million by 6 February 2025.

Looking at Nvidia’s share price chart over the period, most of this value growth has come in the last five years, with the company’s shares rallying on the push into artificial intelligence (AI) and the technology’s requirement for powerful chips.

For reference, we did a similar analysis over five years, after which a R10,000 investment would have grown to R183,648 as of 6 February 2020.

Nvidia’s share price had increased so dramatically by mid-2024 that the company executed a 10-for-1 stock split on Friday, 7 June 2024, increasing the number of issued and outstanding shares 10-fold while dividing each stock’s value by 10.

Stock splits provide the benefit of improving trading liquidity by making a share seem more affordable. The market capitalisation and value of the company do not change.

Effectively, each share an investor held before 7 June 2024 became 10 shares thereafter, each worth a tenth of their value at the time of the split.

Before the split, it had been trading at around $1,200 (then R22,668) per share.

The table below shows how much a R10,000 investment in Nvidia made 10 years ago would be worth today, taking into account the weakening of the rand over the period.

Gaming juggernaut to AI heavyweight

Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang founded Nvidia in 1993, at which point it was purely a graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer primarily targeting PC gamers and content creators.

Demand for its graphics cards skyrocketed with the emergence of proof-of-work ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies.

Graphics cards’ capability to process large amounts of data made them ideal for running specific hashing algorithms needed to verify transactions on blockchains like Ethereum.

The company is also a major player supplying automotive chips. However, Nvidia saw the most explosive growth due to the demand for its AI accelerators.

The manufacturer is the leading designer of accelerators used in data centres globally that power tools like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In July 2024, New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu warned that Nvidia’s rally was ending and downgraded the chipmaker to neutral from buy.

He said the stock was “getting fully valued” after surging by more than 154% earlier in 2024, on top of a gain of nearly 240% in 2023.

While the share price did dip slightly thereafter, dropping to under $100 per share, it bounced back in September 2024 and reached a peak of $149.43 per share in early January 2025.