The other week, I (Chris Reilly) was on a work trip in Vermont. One morning over breakfast, I got to talking with a woman at the table next to me. She asked what I did for work, and I told her I'm in the investment research business.

At RiskHedge, we spend our days researching disruptor stocks with the potential to multiply in value. Historically, technology has been the biggest breeding ground for those kinds of investments.

I gave her Nvidia (NVDA) as our prime example.

Stephen McBride, as most of you know, first recommended Nvidia back in 2018, calling it the one stock he’d buy for the next five years. This was when it was still known primarily as a gaming company. Long before ChatGPT or the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

"Nvidia," she said. "I'm very familiar with that one. That's actually my retirement maker."

I was all ears.

• 12 years ago, she was diagnosed with cancer…

The experience forced her to think seriously about her family's financial future. A friend encouraged her to meet with a financial advisor to help organize her investments.

She walked into that meeting expecting to buy Apple (AAPL). Instead, the advisor suggested another company.

"Why don't you take a look at Nvidia?"

At the time, Nvidia was best known for making graphics chips for video games. She invested $10,000 and, after the purchase, barely thought about the stock again.

"I never sold a share," she told me.

She wouldn't tell me what her investment is worth today.

"You can do the math," she said with a smile.

Since 2014, Nvidia has returned more than 44,000% on a split-adjusted basis. A $10,000 investment back then would be worth roughly $4.4 million today.

Thankfully, she's now cancer-free. That's worth far more than anything in her brokerage account.

Neither she nor her advisor could have predicted Nvidia would eventually become the backbone of the AI revolution. They didn't need to. They simply invested in a profitable, innovative company benefiting from a powerful technological trend.

Stephen arrived at the same conclusion for a very different reason...

• Back in 2018, Stephen believed Wall Street was looking at Nvidia all wrong.

He saw something much bigger. He realized Nvidia's graphics processing units (or GPUs) were quietly becoming the backbone of several technological revolutions happening all at once.

Artificial intelligence... self-driving cars... cloud computing.

As he explained at the time, training artificial intelligence isn't magic. It's a computing problem. Feed a computer millions of images, words, or videos, and it gradually learns to recognize patterns on its own. The faster those calculations happen, the faster the AI learns.

Nvidia's GPUs were already processing those workloads dramatically faster than traditional processors. Companies like Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) were building their AI infrastructure around Nvidia years before ChatGPT introduced artificial intelligence to the rest of the world.

In other words, Stephen recommended Nvidia because he believed it had become the essential infrastructure powering the next generation of computing.

Today, virtually every major frontier AI model—including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and xAI's Grok—runs on Nvidia hardware.

Its CUDA software platform has become deeply embedded across the AI industry, creating one of the strongest competitive advantages in technology. As Chris Wood likes to say, Nvidia has evolved from a chip company into a full-stack AI infrastructure business.

Put simply, you can’t build the future of AI without Nvidia.

In its latest quarter, Nvidia generated more than $81 billion in revenue, while its data center business grew 92% year over year. The company's next-generation Blackwell systems are ramping faster than any product in Nvidia's history, and CEO Jensen Huang says overall AI demand has "gone parabolic."

• I asked Stephen and Chris Wood a simple question: Do you still like Nvidia today?

Nvidia has been in their Disruption Investor portfolio (upgrade here) since September 2020, and they’ve taken profits on it twice.

Despite the stock's incredible run, they believe the long-term story remains strong. We’re still in the early stages of the AI revolution.

The industry has already moved from generative AI to reasoning AI, and now it's entering what Nvidia calls the era of agentic AI—software capable of carrying out complex tasks with minimal human involvement.

Beyond that lies physical AI, where autonomous vehicles, robots, and intelligent machines operate in the real world. Each step requires dramatically more computing power.

And Nvidia continues to supply the infrastructure that makes it possible.

Stephen and Chris believe Nvidia is on track to become a $10 trillion company before the end of the decade, possibly by 2028. The stock will have pullbacks along the way—sometimes sharp ones—but they view them as buying opportunities.

While Nvidia still has legs, it’s already up more than 600% in our Disruption Investor portfolio. In their latest issue, Stephen and Chris updated members on all the exciting AI companies in the portfolio, including buy levels. Go here to upgrade and get their full portfolio.

Chris Reilly Executive Editor, RiskHedge

PS: If you haven’t heard, preorders for Stephen’s new book, Disruption Investing, will open in a couple weeks. We want to reward everyone who buys a copy (or multiple copies). We’re taking your requests as far as bonus ideas go. For example, lunch in LA, Austin, or Abu Dhabi with Stephen... or a half-hour call with him. Let us know your ideas here. Thank you.