If I Could Only Buy and Hold a Single Stock, This Would Be It

There are thousands of stocks from which to choose on U.S. exchanges, and still more in overseas markets. And you can find stocks of any size and flavor you like, from megacaps to penny stocks.

Of course, putting all your eggs in one basket would be a bad idea for any investor. It's better to have a well-rounded portfolio so that you're not overly exposed to troubles that might affect a specific sector, industry, or company. However, if I had to invest in just one stock and hold on to it for the long term, the choice is clear.

It would have to be Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA).

Nvidia creates its own tailwinds

Nvidia is more than just the biggest company in the world by market capitalization. It's arguably the most consequential company when you consider the massive technological changes that are rippling through the world these days.

Image source: Getty Images.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are growing at a breathtaking rate, as companies are working on incorporating the technology into both public-facing and internal processes. Seemingly every industry is affected -- healthcare, financial, consumer companies, automotive, and even government agencies. All are looking for ways to either incorporate AI to make their operations run more smoothly, or to build out features with AI that better monetize customers.

Nvidia is perfectly situated in the middle of all of this. Its high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) are bundled into server clusters and installed in data centers, where they provide the key parallel processing power needed to train and run the most sophisticated AI programs, and those data center operators can't buy them fast enough. Nvidia generated sales of $57 billion in its fiscal 2026 third quarter (which ended Oct. 26), and data center sales made up $51.2 billion of that. Overall sales increased by 62% from the prior-year period, while data center sales rose by 66%.

"Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out," CEO Jensen Huang said in the earnings release.

Just in the fiscal third quarter, Nvidia entered into a partnership with OpenAI. Under the new deal, the chipmaker will sell 10 gigawatts of computing power to the ChatGPT developer, and will also invest $100 billion in the privately held company.

It also announced that Anthropic will buy GPUs to power 1 gigawatt of computing capacity. That deal also calls for Anthropic to buy $30 billion of Microsoft Azure computing capacity, which will be powered by Nvidia GPUs.

And it has other deals with Intel and Palantir Technologies, plus a groundbreaking partnership with Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle, and xAI to build out domestic AI infrastructure using Nvidia GPUs.

Huang says that Nvidia is perfectly situated because there are three "massive" platform shifts happening in computing -- the transition from CPU general computing to GPU-accelerated computing, the growth of generative AI, and the emergence of agentic AI.

"There's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble," he told analysts after the company's earnings report. "From our vantage point, we see something very different. As a reminder, Nvidia Corporation is unlike any other accelerator. We excel at every phase of AI."

Nvidia will just keep growing

The AI phase of Nvidia's growth story started in 2023 as demand for its then-flagship Hopper H100 chips exploded. With its improved Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra lines now available and its next-generation Rubin architecture GPUs on schedule to be available next year, the company's revenues are expected to continue increasing at a rapid pace. CFO Collette Kress suggests that Nvidia will be "the superior choice" for between $3 trillion and $4 trillion in annual AI infrastructure spending by 2030.

NVDA Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts.

For its fiscal fourth quarter, Nvidia issued revenue guidance of $65 billion, which would give it fiscal 2026 revenue of $212.8 billion. If it can get just 33% of total AI infrastructure spending in calendar 2030 -- which would be an astounding $1 trillion of annual revenue -- then Nvidia would experience a compound annual growth rate of 36% over the next five years.

That would be astonishing growth for a company that reached the $5 trillion mark in market cap earlier this year and is still worth more than $4.2 trillion after its recent pullback. If Nvidia can come close to meeting those projections, it will surely break many more records -- and provide strong returns to its investors.

This is a company that's defying all expectations -- figuratively rewriting the rulebook as it goes. That's why it's my one surefire stock to buy and hold for the next several years.

Patrick Sanders has positions in Nvidia and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short November 2025 $21 puts on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.