Let me be painfully honest. For the better part of a year, my analysis of Nvidia was guided by two seemingly unshakable pillars of financial logic. The first was a headline that, for any market journalist, is the equivalent of a flashing red light on the dashboard: C-suite insiders, including CEO Jensen Huang himself, were selling stock. Not just a little bit, but a headline-grabbing sum that soared past one billion dollars. I saw it, I read the reports in the Financial Times and on CNBC, and I came to the same conclusion many of my peers did: the people who know the company best were cashing out. The alarm bell was ringing.

The second pillar was a narrative I, too, helped perpetuate. I would look at Nvidia’s meteoric rise and ask the inevitable question: “What’s next?” More specifically, “Who is next?” I wrote articles speculating on which company, be it a nimble startup or a re-energized tech giant like Meta, would become the “next Nvidia.” The subtext was clear: Nvidia’s hyper-growth phase had to be finite. The law of large numbers is undefeated, and no company, no matter how revolutionary, can grow to the sky forever. I was convinced the story was shifting from Nvidia’s dominance to the race for its successor.

I believed these things sincerely. I built my case on them, advising caution and a healthy dose of skepticism. The data points seemed to support my thesis. But a few weeks ago, during a late-night research session for a piece on global tech spending, a single document stopped me cold. It wasn’t a leaked spec sheet or a confidential memo. It was a public budget proposal from a foreign government, detailing a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year plan for building a national, sovereign AI cloud. It was a dry, bureaucratic document, but in its pages, my entire thesis about Nvidia began to crumble.

My first pillar—the insider sales—was the easiest to build and the first to fall. The billion-dollar figure is staggering in isolation. It’s a number designed to shock and trigger a primal fear in investors. What I failed to do, in my haste to sound the alarm, was to apply the most basic contextual analysis. These sales, for the most part, were executed under pre-scheduled 10b5-1 trading plans, designed to avoid any appearance of trading on non-public information. More importantly, I had ignored the denominator. For executives whose net worth is overwhelmingly tied up in company stock that has appreciated by thousands of percent, selling a small fraction of their holdings isn't a vote of no confidence; it’s basic, rational financial planning. It’s diversification. My mistake was focusing on the size of the sale rather than the size of the conviction that remained. The real signal wasn’t the selling; it was the market’s reaction. After these sales were widely reported, the stock didn’t collapse. It hit new all-time highs. The broader market, the institutional money, saw the billion-dollar headline and collectively shrugged, telling me I was looking at the wrong data point.

This realization led me to reconsider my second, more fundamental belief: that Nvidia’s growth was peaking. My search for the “next Nvidia” was predicated on the idea that its primary market—supplying chips to a handful of American Big Tech companies—was becoming saturated. That’s where the government budget proposal I read came in. It wasn’t just one country. A quick search revealed similar initiatives brewing in France, the UAE, Japan, Singapore, and Canada. I had been thinking of the AI race as a sprint run by a dozen athletes. I now see it’s a global Olympics, and entire nations are the new teams.

This is the “Sovereign AI” narrative. It’s not just a PR buzzword; it’s the next, and potentially much larger, chapter in this story. Nations have realized that AI is a foundational technology, akin to electricity or the internet. To be a global power in the 21st century, you cannot be wholly dependent on another country’s infrastructure for your core intelligence. You must build your own. And who is the primary architect and equipment supplier for this global build-out? Nvidia. I had been staring at the ceiling, thinking the room was fully built, without realizing that Nvidia was about to be contracted to build an entire new skyscraper next door. The total addressable market I was using in my calculations wasn't just wrong; it was an order of magnitude too small.

Even as I grappled with this, I held onto a sliver of my old skepticism. A company this focused on massive, nation-state-level deals could easily grow arrogant and neglect its roots. It could forget the gamers and creators who built the brand in the first place. But then came the steady drumbeat of leaks and rumors from the enthusiast press about the upcoming RTX 50 series. What stood out wasn’t just the promise of more power, but the specific focus on addressing VRAM limitations—one of the most persistent and valid criticisms from the community about the previous generation. This wasn’t the behavior of a complacent monopolist. It was the mark of a company actively listening, course-correcting, and tending to its foundation even as it reached for the sky. They were not only securing the next decade of enterprise growth but also working to win back goodwill in their core consumer market.

It’s a humbling experience to realize your entire framework for understanding a company was built on a flawed premise. I was so focused on the rearview mirror—on lagging indicators like scheduled stock sales and the saturation of a single market segment—that I failed to look through the windshield at the vast, new territory emerging ahead. I am not here to tell you that Nvidia is without risk or that its stock is a guaranteed win. But I am here to confess that my previous narrative of caution was incomplete. I was telling a story about the end of a chapter, without realizing that the book was far, far longer than I could have imagined.