Nvidia stock is up 5% so far in 2026, but that still leaves it trailing the S&P 500, which is up nearly 10% this year. For investors who got used to Nvidia setting the pace, this has been a slower run.
The mismatch matters because Nvidia has not suddenly lost its place in AI. Its GPUs and the hardware around them remain central to the buildout at several AI hyperscalers and cloud providers, and Wall Street analysts still expect revenue to rise 82% this year and 41% next year. Even so, the stock is not moving like a market leader in 2026.
That is why the stock is getting attention now. Nvidia delivered market-crushing returns in 2023, 2024 and 2025, so a year with only a 5% gain feels weak by comparison, especially when the broader market is doing better. Investors are looking at a company that still sits at the center of AI spending, but whose share price has stopped outpacing everything around it.
The spending backdrop is still enormous. The big four AI hyperscalers plan to spend around $650 billion on data center capital expenditures this year, and Nvidia projects that figure could reach $1 trillion next year. That is the kind of demand that keeps the long-term case intact, even if the stock has not kept up in the short term.
Valuation also helps explain why the market is not treating Nvidia like a runaway story anymore. The stock trades at 21.7 times forward earnings, which makes it look cheaper when next year’s profits are used rather than this year’s. That is a reminder that the company’s growth is still doing a lot of the work in the valuation.
There is still a catch. A stock can have strong business momentum and still underperform if expectations are already huge, and Nvidia has spent several years resetting what counts as ordinary. So far in 2026, the market is asking for more than growth alone; it wants gains that can outrun the S&P 500 again.
For now, the better read is that Nvidia remains a core AI name with powerful fundamentals, but 2026 is not shaping up as another easy victory lap. Unless the stock starts to close the gap, this will go down as the year Wall Street kept believing in Nvidia even while the market moved ahead without it.
