If I Could Buy and Hold Just 1 Stock Forever, This Would Be It

Patrick Sanders, The Motley Fool

Sat, Jul 5, 2025, 5:15 PM 5 min read

• Demand for Nvidia's high-end chips remains intense.

• Despite its massive size, its top and bottom lines continue to rise rapidly.

• CEO Jensen Huang deserves to be recognized as one of the globe's best.

• 10 stocks we like better than Nvidia ›

Asking someone to pick just one stock of the thousands of publicly traded companies in the world is a daunting task. First of all, no portfolio should be built on a single company -- the best way to grow your wealth over time is with a diversified portfolio.

But every portfolio has to have a starting point, and if I were starting mine from scratch -- and choosing individual stocks instead of an exchange-traded fund -- my first draft pick would be the unquestioned leader in generative artificial intelligence (AI): Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA).

Here are three reasons why.

Nvidia's long-established growth story got a fresh boost in 2023, when the explosion in demand for generative AI had customers scooping up Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) as fast as its foundry partners could make them. GPUs are parallel processing chips -- tools designed for handling specific types of complex calculations that can easily be divided up into massive numbers of smaller tasks, each of which can be dealt with simultaneously, as opposed to calculations where tasks have to be dealt with sequentially. Most of the heavy lifting in the AI realm consists of computational work that parallel processors excel at, and those chips can be combined into huge clusters to work even faster.

Nvidia has a remarkable 92% market share in the GPU market, according to estimates from Jon Peddie Research. Demand is intense for its new Blackwell chips, which are the successors to its popular Hopper chips. As CEO Jensen Huang said in the company's first-quarter earnings release:

"Global demand for Nvidia's AI infrastructure is incredibly strong. AI inference token generation has surged tenfold in just one year, and as AI agents become mainstream, the demand for AI computing will accelerate. Countries around the world are recognizing AI as essential infrastructure -- just like electricity and the internet -- and Nvidia stands at the center of this profound transformation."

Its competitive position is strengthened by its CUDA software platform, which, among other things, provides libraries and tools that help developers work on AI models that are powered specifically by Nvidia GPUs. Because CUDA is only compatible with Nvidia's chips, switching to another company's chips is more complex and expensive, which should help lock Nvidia's clients in for years to come.