Key Points
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Nvidia’s data center revenue grew 117% year over year, while its NVQLink technology is becoming the connective tissue linking quantum computing hardware to classical AI.
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Alphabet’s Waymo now completes 500,000 paid robotaxi rides weekly and is funding a $5 billion global expansion.
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A $10,000 investment split evenly between the two today could roughly double to nearly triple by 2030.
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Pick almost any frontier of anything from modern tech, search, or advertising, cloud computing, self-driving cars, or quantum physics, and odds are Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) or Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is already standing in it. Split $10,000 between the two today, and you aren’t just buying a search engine and a chipmaker. You are betting that the next five years of computing will be built largely on top of what these two companies are shipping right now.
Image source: Getty Images.
Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a “Double Down” signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same “Total Conviction” signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »
Nvidia
Nvidia’s second-quarter data center revenue hit $89 billion, up 117% from a year earlier. Data center revenue is simply the money Nvidia makes selling chips to the massive server farms that power AI, the physical buildings packed with computers that run everything from ChatGPT to online search and AI features. That growth came largely from Blackwell Ultra, Nvidia’s current flagship chip family, ramping into the build-outs of nearly every major cloud provider on earth, meaning companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet are all buying Nvidia hardware to stock the data centers they rent out to businesses and AI developers.
Nvidia has already moved past Blackwell in conversation, too. Its newer chip platform, called Vera Rubin, is now in full production and promises up to 10 times lower cost per AI token than Blackwell delivered. In short, a token is roughly a chunk of text an AI model processes, so a lower cost per token means it gets meaningfully cheaper to run AI software at scale, which matters enormously for whether AI companies can eventually turn a profit. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has laid out a path to $1 trillion in cumulative sales from Blackwell and Rubin combined between 2025 and 2027 alone, according to The Information. That figure would have sounded like science fiction five years ago.
Then there’s another bet: quantum computing. Nvidia doesn’t build quantum processors itself, but its NVQLink technology now connects quantum hardware directly to Nvidia’s GPU supercomputers, and nearly every serious quantum player, from IonQ to national research labs, has started building on top of it.
Alphabet
Alphabet’s core advertising and search business remains the cash engine funding everything else, but “everything else” has gotten remarkably interesting. According to Tech Crunch, Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, now completes 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 U.S. cities, up tenfold in under two years, and it’s targeting 1 million weekly rides across 20 cities by the end of 2026, including its first international markets. Waymo just upsized its first-ever debt offering to $5 billion specifically to fund that global expansion, a sign Alphabet is treating this less like a moonshot experiment and more like a business it intends to scale aggressively.
On the quantum side, Alphabet’s Willow chip completed a benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take today’s fastest supercomputers an estimated 10 septillion years, a number so large it stops meaning anything useful except “a lot.” Google has begun offering early access to Willow to external researchers, a step toward figuring out what a chip that fast is actually good for commercially. Layer Gemini’s ongoing push into search, cloud, and enterprise AI tools on top of that, and Alphabet looks like a conglomerate that happens to also sell ads.
Running the numbers
Alphabet trades around $354 per share, and Nvidia sits closer to $230 per share. Split $10,000 evenly between them, $5,000 each, and that buys roughly 14.1 shares of Alphabet and about 21.8 shares of Nvidia. Nothing fancy there, just simple division, but it’s worth actually doing the math rather than treating these as abstract tickers, because 14 shares of one company and 22 of another is a very different feeling than a lump sum sitting in an account.
Where this gets fun is projecting forward. Picture a steadier path first: Alphabet climbing to around $450 a share by 2030 as its cloud and AI businesses keep maturing, and Nvidia reaching roughly $500 as the Blackwell-to-Rubin transition plays out reasonably well. Under that scenario, the original $10,000 grows to somewhere around $17,245, not a moonshot, but a healthy return for five years of patience. Now picture the more optimistic version, the one where Waymo’s robotaxi expansion actually hits its stride, Nvidia’s quantum partnerships start paying off, and both companies keep compounding closer to their best-case potential. Alphabet near $650 and Nvidia near $900 would push that same $10,000 up toward $28,785, nearly triple the original stake.
It’s easy for me to say this. Remember, Nvidia’s valuation already assumes years of AI spending keep accelerating, and Alphabet faces its own regulatory overhang from years of antitrust scrutiny in both the U.S. and Europe. Betting on both doesn’t eliminate that risk; it just diversifies which frontier-tech story has to keep working.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, IonQ, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
