Nvidia Leads S&P 500 Stocks as AI Infrastructure Booms

Nvidia stands out as the top performer among the S&P 500 stocks of the past decade, boasting a staggering total return of nearly 13,589%. The company's AI-related business has been driving its growth, and its market value has surged from around $418 billion to over $4.5 trillion since November 2022.

The majority of the top 10 performers share a common thread: they are all connected to the buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Chipmakers such as Nvidia, AMD, Micron, and Lam Research supply the necessary components, while Arista Networks provides networking switches for AI data centers. Lumentum makes optical parts that move data between server racks, and Seagate supplies storage drives used in AI training clusters.

However, Comfort Systems stands out as an exception, benefiting from a different angle. The mechanical and electrical contractor's backlog has climbed to around $12 billion as hyperscalers race to build and cool new data centers. Tesla is another outlier, with its return driven more by electric vehicle demand than AI infrastructure.

Analysts estimate that roughly 60% of data center capacity planned for 2027 has yet to break ground, which could keep this group of stocks in focus through the back half of the decade.