About a year ago, Nvidia fired the earnings report heard around the world. Since then, the chip design giant’s stock has soared 248%.

On May 23, Nvidia realized my April prediction that a strong quarterly earnings report could propel the company’s stock price past $1,000 a share.

Nvidia — which contracts out chip manufacturing — not only beat expectations and raised guidance, the company also announced a 10-for-1 stock split, bought back billions’ worth of stock, and considerably boosted its dividend.

When the stock split sends Nvidia’s stock down to around $100 a share, I expect the company will sustain the high growth that sent its stock price soaring. Here are three reasons its shares could again top $1,000 post-split:

Nvidia faced an exceptionally high growth hurdle as the anniversary of its mind-blowing first quarter 2023 earnings report — featuring a 54% better than expected growth forecast for Q2 2023 — neared.

Below are the key investor expectations for Nvidia in the most recent quarter, according to my April 2024 Forbes post, and how much Nvidia beat those targets:

Nvidia also decided to take a bow for investors like Warren Buffett who like stock buybacks and dividends.

To that end, the chip designer announced a 10-for-1 stock split effective June 7, bought back $7.7 billion of the company’s shares, and more than doubled its dividend from four cents to 10 cents based on the current share count, noted the Wall Street Journal.

“We are fundamentally changing how computing works and what computers can do,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a conference call with analysts. “The next industrial revolution has begun.”

The most important question a CEO must answer is: Whither future growth? In my book, Disciplined Growth Strategies, I described a canvas on which leaders can paint their future growth trajectories. This canvas consists of five dimensions of growth — new or current customer groups, products, geographies, capabilities, and culture.

In high tech markets, business leaders must place the right bets on future growth opportunities before their rivals beat them to the punch. Such bets are particularly vital because technology product life cycles are short and rivals are quick to copy innovations.

For Nvidia, the key dimensions of growth are customer group and product. Here are the company’s key bets on each dimension:

Under Huang’s leadership, over the last 15 years, Nvidia’s share of the AI chip industry has reached somewhere between 80% and 95%, I wrote in my February 2024 Forbes article.

As I wrote then, signs of Nvidia’s market power include:

The biggest risk to Nvidia’s continuing stock market rise is the company’s dependence on Huang — who at some point will no longer be the company’s CEO.

As I described in my forthcoming book, Brain Rush, Huang is the rare CEO — accounting for fewer than 0.4% of founders — who can turn their idea into a public company worth billions of dollars — or in Nvidia’s case trillions of them.

He has done a great job in five of the six key leadership tasks that distinguish such leaders:

The final leadership task is preparing the next CEO. Is Huang developing a successor who could do the CEO job as well or better than he is doing it now? TechNewsWorld argued Huang would keep serving as CEO for a decade and gradually replace himself with “digital Jensen Huangs.” Really?

Officially, Nvidia considers succession planning to be important. For example, Nvidia operates a management development and exposure program involving more than “60 senior managers working directly with the CEO to execute corporate strategies,” according to Nvidia’s 2024 annual report. Nvidia also offers executive development programs including “ training courses, mentoring, peer coaching, and ongoing feedback.”

In the year since Nvidia’s boffo May 2023 quarterly report, the company’s stock has risen 248%.

Nvidia stock — after splitting 10-for-1 early in June — could rise from $100 to $1,000 by 2026. This optimistic scenario assumes Nvidia keeps beating growth expectations and raising its forecasts — resulting in a 248% annual increase in the company’s stock price over the next two years.

Optimism is certainly justified, according to one analyst. “I say it's the most important company in the world, as far as innovation,” Jim Roppel, founder of The Roppel Report, told Investor’s Business Daily.

“Nvidia has managed to leapfrog from one tech trend to another, beginning with video games, then moving to things like automotive applications and now generative AI,” he added.

Generative AI’s productivity benefits could crimp inflation — sustaining strong demand for Nvidia’s products. “The major innovation cycle is healthy and thriving,” he told IBD. “I really think this golden goose is ripping. The golden goose is working overtime here.”

Another analyst is less sanguine. Nvidia stock could drop unless it beats expectations by at least $1.5 billion in future quarters, Susquehanna analyst Christopher Rolland wrote in a May 20 client note, reported the Journal.

Another risk to investors? “Moves from competitors—including in-house chip efforts at its own largest customers,” the Journal noted.

Some day the Nvidia bears will be right. That day could be a decade away.