Years until NVIDIA’s revenue exceeds U.S. GDP

by philg

Happy Labor Day to those not smart enough to refrain from working!

Soon all of our dreary poetry writing, creative image and video production, etc. will be accomplished by LLMs. Freed from this labor we will be able to spend all of our time cleaning the kitchen, unclogging drains, fixing roofs in 90-degree Florida heat/humidity, etc.

Let’s check in with the machines that will be doing all of our laboring going forward.

NVIDIA recently released some financials:

My question for NVIDIA chips, via ChatGPT:

Extrapolating from revenue trends of the last five years, how long will it be before Nvidia’s annual revenue exceeds the United States GDP?

The answer:

Short answer: about 2036—but only under a wildly unrealistic straight-line extrapolation.

Here’s the quick math I used:

  • Nvidia’s last five fiscal-year revenues (billions): 2021 $16.7, 2022 $26.9, 2023 $27.0, 2024 $60.9, 2025 $130.5. That implies a ~67% CAGR from FY2021→FY2025. Macrotrends
  • U.S. nominal GDP: about $29.2T for calendar year 2024 (BEA Table 1.1.5); latest quarterly SAAR (Q2 2025) is $30.35T. FRED+1

Assuming Nvidia keeps compounding revenue at ~65–70% annually and U.S. GDP grows ~4% nominal per year, Nvidia’s annual revenue would mathematically catch U.S. GDP in roughly 11.4 years—i.e., mid-2036. With GDP held flat at today’s level, the crossing is ~10.5 years. (This requires ~224× growth from FY2025 revenue.)

Sensitivity (still using simple exponential curves):

  • If Nvidia grows 40%/yr → cross in ~18 years (≈2043).
  • 30%/yr → ~24 years (≈2049).
  • 20%/yr → ~38 years (≈2063).

⚠️ Reality check: this comparison is apples-to-oranges (company revenue vs a country’s value-added), and no firm can sustain ~60–70% annual growth for a decade+ in a competitive, capacity-constrained industry. Treat the dates above as a fun extrapolation, not a forecast.

How did Grok do on this question? Terrible. Its initial interpretation of the question was that it was about this year’s U.S. GDP, i.e., that it should hold GDP constant. When corrected, it chose an absurd 8.5 annual growth rate for U.S. GDP (would make sense only if there is 6 percent inflation; we’re lucky if we can eke out 2 percent real GDP growth even after flooding the U.S. with migrants; per-capita real annual GDP growth in the U.S. has been about 1.3 percent per year during the past 25 years (FRED)).

Loosely related:

21 thoughts on “Years until NVIDIA’s revenue exceeds U.S. GDP”

  1. > Extrapolating from revenue trends of the last five years, how long will it be before Nvidia’s annual revenue exceeds the United States GDP?
    …
    >How did Grok do on this question? Terrible.

    So, better than expected.

    Grok (a word invented by American science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 “Stranger in a Strange Land” novel, my words not Grok’s) totally ignored the Yellowstone Caldera economic super-bubble waiting for the right pin to burst it. Welcome back corporate welfare (Nvidia will be first in line with the porridge bowl: “We power ‘Grok’–we are too big to fail!”).

    Labor Day Link:

    • PhilG Fan:

      I suspect you are Trey or Matt, plugging a show on life support. (Plumber crack trigger warning @1:07.) I wasn’t even aware it was still being made.

      From our racially unbiased AI overlords:

      > Is Cartman Still Antisemitic in South Park?

      Yes, Eric Cartman from South Park continues to exhibit antisemitic behavior, even in the latest episodes of the series. His character has been consistently portrayed as a bigot, particularly against his Jewish friend, Kyle Broflovski.

      Recent Developments
      In the most recent season, which includes episodes aired in 2025, Cartman remains a central figure in the show’s satire. For instance, in the episode titled “Got a Nut,” he engages in right-wing podcasting, where he expresses antisemitic views, reflecting the show’s ongoing commentary on contemporary issues. This episode aired on August 6, 2025, and showcases Cartman’s character as still deeply entrenched in his bigoted ways.

      > Would it be a funny episode to have Cartman convert to Judiasm, attend Columbia University and be antisemitic by protesting for Palestine?

      Overall, the concept of Cartman converting to Judaism and attending Columbia University has the potential to be funny, especially if it plays on his established character traits and the show’s penchant for satire. The humor would likely stem from the absurdity of the situation and the inevitable conflicts that arise from Cartman’s personality clashing with a new environment.

    • @South Park Protester

      Only Philip G., the inventor of the iPhone and ecosystem, has the stones to publish your user comment, Trey and Matt are lightweights in comparison. I mean he had the nerve to criticize, in a non-confrontational, friendly way, Fed Overlord Lisa Best Vader, Economist (55%) and Teacher (55%). Reason on that for a while.

      I <3 South Park.

    • This just in: prominent Palestinian Buddist gets B.A. in philosophy from Columbia:

      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/02/mohsen-mahdawi-columbia-university-palestinian

      (Check out his traditional keffiyeh/Columbia-blue robe, in my day the rebels wore Greatful Dead yarmulkes and protested Apartheid.)

      > “I feel excited about this phase and I feel victorious that the government has failed to strip me from my education,”

      Mahdawi added. Fellow pro-Palestinian porn-star Mia Khalifa reportedly stripped herself from her clothes in solidarity.

    • @Trust No. 1

      I love it how Mr. Mahdawi claims, “They have failed to silence me” while back home, Arab governments not only silence entire populations generation after generation but also force people into show-off staged protests. And yet, Mr. Mahdawi doesn’t give a fu*k or any concern for his own brothers and sisters living under that oppression back home. All the while, he is enjoying a paradise lifestyle here in the U.S.!

    • South Park Protester: I read this on the title page of The Screwtape Letters:

      > The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.

      Consider this in the light of banning South Park. I think South Park were doing kind of a religious thing by mocking the devil out of many a societal phenomena.

    • @PhilG Fan

      You probably would get farther than page 1 of the Screwtape Letters if you stopped watching South Park. I’m working on Huxley’s “Heaven and Hell”.

      Seriously, though, I might approve of an episode where Cartman is sent into Columbia U. to woo Greta (now matriculating in manosphere studies and hair dressing) away from her Buddhist Palestinian boyfriend, and turn her back into a nice non-protesting Swedish tradwife subject to a king, as penance for his antisemitic ways. Counter protesters would say, hinting at the Epstein files saga, “Release your report cards, Greta!” when the controversy of how she was admitted erupts. Phil G. could get a cameo as a helicopter pilot sent in to extract Cartman when he is trapped in a cloud of tear gas sent in by drones.

      Matt and Trey keep sending back my scripts marked “Unread: Will Not Produce”. So really I’m protesting the treatment of my unsolicited scripts, which are starving and getting fatter.

    • SPP:

      > You probably would get farther than page 1 of the Screwtape Letters if you stopped watching South Park.

      Haha! Yes, you’re right, it needs a lot of reflection to read. I have been in middle for some time.

      > Phil G. could get a cameo as a helicopter pilot sent in to extract

      Don’t forget to make him wear an MIT T-shirt, and a mask. Maybe make his helicopter also wear a mask. And he must insist that everyone needs to wear a mask in his helicopter and that they should call him Dr. Phil or Dr. Greenspun.

    • (Our collaborative cartoons in aerospace were always the funniest.)

      Yeah @PGF, that’s the spirit–MIT shirt! Dr. Richard Feynman of course was rejected by Columbia due to Jewish quotas and “had to” go to MIT. He was better off there anyway, IMO:

      https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Feynman/

      Trump, true to character, had gone ballistic when he heard Greta Thunberg got in Columbia with a 0.2 GPA, 900 SAT, and reference letters from suspected Hamas leaders–due to a secret underground DEI program in their School of General Studies admissions department. She had won the Nobel Peace prize, and could afford a first class seat on a 737-MAX from Stockholm, and one semester of tuition.

      Trump tries to export her using masked ICE agents, and the rest of the South Park–surreal, modern Lil Rascals–try to prevent that from happening so she can be converted. An ICE agent, actually a protestor trying to infiltrate ICE, hands her his mask and says “You are going to need this more than I am.” He also hands her the “Power Sword”, a reference to her hair cut and “He Man, Master of the Universe.”

      I guess a lot could be borrowed from “Animal House” and PG’s blog, too. Greta gets super fat like Cartman, because to protest, all she has to do is roll out of bed and into the quad. Evil dean, “Fat, drunk, and protesting is no way to go through life Greta.” Stupid frat boys, “Did the French give up when the Nazis marched into Paris?” “Well, yes actually…”

      Would be kind of funny, but the official website says–“No pitches, thank you!” I always assumed Matt and Trey are in converted apartments in NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain complex–to protect them from all the people they pissed off over the years. Becky of course could be selling Cheyenne Mountain resort-style condos for $3.5M each–with open houses serving cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

      I’m seriously you guys, this could be really fricking sweeeet. Filthy hippie protesters, gonna need a Hazmat suit.

      — Cartman^H^H^H^H^H^H South Park Protester

    • Interesting…from the St. Andrews article:

      After leaving school he [Feynman] applied to several universities to study there. One would have expected every university to which he applied would enthusiastically offer him a place but it was not that easy. Although his grades in mathematics and science were outstanding, he had performed much less well in other subjects. There was also the “problem” that he was a Jew, which really was a problem in the United States at this time with universities having quotas on the number of Jews they admitted. [Cough…Asians now…cough.] He sat an entrance examination for Columbia University and they turned him down. He never quite forgave them for charging him 15 dollars and then rejecting him. He was accepted, however, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

      P.S. My contributions to the crowd-sourced South Park: Make Cartman Fat Again, send him to Palestine to starve and as cannon fodder. Greta admits on her college application, “I am autistic, which is literally, actually ‘mentally ill’ so I need a DEI fast pass.” A huge stash of toilet paper and N-95 masks is found in Phil’s luxury vacation apartment in Cambridge, Maskachussetts–“just in case the Scientists are right”.

    • @PhilG Fan

      How about the ending?

      A scene where all the protesters say, like in Spartacus, “I am Cartman!”. Then show Kenny, drugs falling out from under his hoodie after he raises his hands and says (muffled) “I am Kenny!” and a hellfire missile comes out of nowhere and destroys him. Kyle says “Oh my God, they killed Kenny. You bastards!”

      I was going to comment on that NFL/genocide article–then I had to use the airsickness bag in the back of the seat in front of me and I forgot what it was. I suspect Phil has a ways to go on his v-taper before he can keep up with zerohedge (for real, that was the grossest Twitter avatar I’ve ever seen, yuck) on TwitX.

    • @T#1

      We’d have to decide whether Kenny was wearing a sombrero, a hijab, or the hoodie/keffiyeh of his “Colorado” homeland, but yeah, kinda funny, I guess.

    • “I love you Eric Cartman,” said Greta, wiping the sweat and protesting grime from her He-Man brow with her Palestinian keffiyeh.

      “I know, baby girl, I know,” said Cartman, sweeping her into a sort of fat-person/fat-person embrace, “Let’s starve…together.”

  3. Kind of like the 80’s again, with us hitting an upper limit on what can be done with neural networks, with reasonable amounts of money. Except for some stackoverflow searches getting copied & pasted, the output is still garbage no-one reads.

  4. The current NVIDIA price assumes an extremely optimistic two-stage DCF model (model variants):

    40-45% growth for 5 years + 8% perpetual, or
    30% growth for 5 years + 12-15% perpetual growth, or
    30% growth extended to 8-10 years + 8% perpetual

  5. > per-capita real annual GDP growth in the U.S. has been about 1.3 percent per year during the past 25 years

    Yet through the magic of $10T new debt ($30k per capita) during covid, the GDP per capita grew 40% from $64,411 in 2020 to $89,105 in 2025?

  6. Eke something out – to use something slowly or carefully because you only have a small amount of it:

    “There wasn’t much food left, but we just managed to eke it out.”

    eke out a living “He managed to eke out a living (= earn just enough to live on) one summer by selling drinks on a beach.”

    (Cambridge Dictionary)

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