Three Dividend Aristocrats Riding the AI Wave: Why These Stock Split Winners Deserve a Decade-Long Hold

The Case for Long-Term Ownership After Recent Stock Divisions

When management decides to execute a stock split in 2024, it typically signals confidence in a company’s runway for sustained growth. The practice has become increasingly common among mega-cap tech firms, and the announcement often resonates as bullish sentiment from insiders. However, not every company deserves the label of “decade-hold material.” Today, we’re examining three powerhouses that have recently gone through stock splits—and why their underlying business fundamentals make them compelling choices for patient capital.

The strategic choice to divide shares reflects management’s optimism about future expansion. More importantly, it can lower the barrier to entry for retail investors. Yet the real story isn’t the split itself; it’s the competitive advantages and growth catalysts these businesses possess.

Amazon: The Unstoppable Commerce and Cloud Colossus

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) executed its fourth stock split in June 2022, a 20-for-1 division that marked the company’s return to splitting territory after over 20 years of dormancy. Since that corporate action, the stock has appreciated roughly 170%—a performance that reflects the market’s confidence in the e-commerce and cloud infrastructure king.

The Cloud Computing Moat

AWS operates as the world’s preeminent cloud infrastructure backbone, generating $33 billion in annual revenue with accelerating growth rates of 20%. The artificial intelligence revolution has become the primary jet fuel for this division. As enterprises scramble to build AI capabilities, they require massive computational horsepower and sophisticated infrastructure—precisely what AWS delivers at scale. Amazon’s custom silicon investments (Trainium and Inferentia chips) position the company as a cost leader, enabling it to capture an outsized share of the AI workload migration.

Advertising: The Hidden Profit Engine

Few investors fully appreciate the potency of Amazon’s advertising division, which has become the second-largest profit generator after AWS. This segment grew 22% annually and now generates $17.7 billion in revenue. By owning the customer touchpoint and leveraging first-party data accumulated from hundreds of millions of transactions, Amazon delivers intent-driven ad placements that command premium pricing from sellers and brands. This business operates at venture-capital-grade margins while scaling across geographies.

Retail’s Durable Competitive Advantages

Despite maturation in e-commerce growth rates, Amazon’s $180.2 billion in quarterly net sales (Q3 reporting) demonstrate that the base business remains formidable. The logistics network, economies of scale, and 240 million Prime members create a moat that competitors cannot easily breach. The Prime ecosystem—bundling fast shipping, streaming entertainment, and healthcare services—locks in customer spending and drives powerful network effects.

Automation investments in warehouses promise margin expansion in coming years, further enhancing profitability.

Netflix: Streaming’s Profitability Inflection Point

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) completed its most recent stock split in November 2025, a 10-for-1 division that joins its 2-for-1 (2004) and 7-for-1 (2015) predecessors. This pattern of regular splits reflects the company’s consistent execution and market valuation growth.

The Margin Explosion

The most significant shift in Netflix’s trajectory is the pivot from subscriber maximization to profitable expansion. Q3 2025 results captured this transformation: $11.5 billion in revenue (up 17% year-over-year), but more crucially, a 28% operating margin alongside free cash flow of $2.7 billion. For 2025 in aggregate, management projects approximately $9 billion in free cash flow generation. This profitability inflection validates the company’s evolved business model.

Diversification Beyond Subscriptions

While ad-supported tiers represent the headline growth story—projected to double revenue in 2025—Netflix is methodically building new revenue streams. Gaming, live sports events, and merchandise represent nascent but high-potential categories. Each creates incremental monetization without requiring massive content spending increments, improving overall economics.

The Untapped International Opportunity

North American and Canadian subscriber markets approach saturation, yet Asia, Europe, and Latin America remain substantially underpenetrated. Netflix’s strategy of investing in locally-produced, globally-resonant original content (Squid Game, Stranger Things) has proven the viability of this playbook. The brand has achieved such penetration that subscription fee increases generate minimal churn, signaling robust pricing power.

The content library, combined with algorithmic understanding of viewer preferences, creates defensibility that traditional media incumbents struggle to replicate.

Nvidia: The Indispensable Foundation of the AI Economy

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) executed a 10-for-1 split in June 2024, following a 4-for-1 division in 2021. Since the 2024 stock split, shares have climbed approximately 55%, reflecting the market’s continued enthusiasm for the GPU leader.

Dominance That’s Nearly Unassailable

Nvidia’s position as the essential technology provider for artificial intelligence has created one of the most defensible competitive advantages in modern tech. The company commands an estimated 80-90% market share in data center AI chips, and its graphics processors represent the gold standard for both training and inference workloads.

Q3 2026 results (October 2025 closing) showcased the magnitude of this dominance: $57 billion in record revenue (up 62% annually) and diluted EPS of $1.30. The data center division alone contributed $51.2 billion (up 66% year-over-year), underscoring the relentless demand for AI acceleration hardware.

The CUDA Ecosystem Fortress

Nvidia’s true competitive fortress isn’t merely the hardware—it’s the CUDA software platform and its surrounding ecosystem. CUDA has become the de facto standard for GPU-accelerated computing. Millions of developers globally have built their applications and expertise around this architecture. The switching costs for enterprises and developers are prohibitively high; moving workloads to alternative platforms would require rewriting code, retraining staff, and forgoing optimizations painstakingly developed over years.

This ecosystem creates a network effect that competitors have been unable to penetrate meaningfully. Third-party tools, libraries, and community support make CUDA the path of least resistance for organizations seeking GPU acceleration.

An Order Book That Defies Demand

The company maintains a $500 billion backlog of orders extending through 2026, a figure that underscores the structural supply-demand imbalance favoring the chipmaker. Next-generation architectures (Blackwell and Rubin) remain the subject of intense demand from cloud providers and enterprises alike.

Expansion Horizons

Beyond data centers, Nvidia is positioning itself in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and industrial digital twins—markets potentially worth trillions across the coming decade. These nascent segments represent optionality that could drive meaningful incremental revenue in the 2030s.

The Takeaway: Patience Rewarded

Companies that undergo stock splits in 2024 and beyond may signal management confidence, but the real investment thesis hinges on competitive advantages, financial trajectory, and addressable market size. Amazon, Netflix, and Nvidia each possess durable moats, accelerating profitability or growth, and exposure to multi-trillion-dollar secular trends in cloud computing, digital entertainment, and artificial intelligence.

For investors with a 10-year time horizon, these three represent quality businesses at inflection points in their respective cycles.