The Long Game: Why These Three Split Stocks Remain Compelling Through 2035 and Beyond

The Stock Split Signal: What It Really Means for Patient Investors

When management decides to split shares, it’s rarely arbitrary. Companies typically make this move after aggressive price appreciation, signaling internal confidence about sustained expansion ahead. Over the past few years, numerous stocks have executed splits, yet their long-term trajectories differ dramatically. If you’re looking to deploy capital with a multi-decade horizon, here’s what separates the wheat from the chaff.

Amazon: The Cloud-to-Commerce Powerhouse Redefining Profit Centers

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has executed four major stock splits—most notably a 20-for-1 adjustment in June 2022, which marked the company’s first split since the late 1990s. The aftermath has been striking: shares have climbed roughly 170% in the years following that restructuring.

What makes Amazon particularly intriguing isn’t any single business line, but rather how multiple engines are firing simultaneously. AWS remains the crown jewel—the planet’s dominant cloud platform. As enterprises race to embed AI capabilities into their operations, they’re funneling unprecedented computational demands toward AWS infrastructure. Amazon’s strategic bet on proprietary silicon (Trainium and Inferentia chips) creates a cost advantage that competitors will find difficult to replicate, effectively locking in customers and widening margins.

But here’s where it gets interesting: the advertising segment is now the profit growth driver. Revenue in this category accelerated 22% to $17.7 billion in the most recent quarter, and it’s operating at margins that dwarf e-commerce. By controlling the shopping destination and wielding first-party customer data, Amazon sells intent-based advertising that sellers can’t ignore—a duopoly-style business model.

E-commerce itself, while maturing in North America, benefits from relentless logistics optimization. Automation investments and robotics rollouts are expected to compress operating costs further. The Prime ecosystem—spanning 240+ million members globally—creates a moat through convenience stickiness. Subscribers use Amazon for streaming, pharmacy services, and one-click shopping, encouraging wallet-share consolidation.

Recent quarterly results underscore the thesis: $180.2 billion in net sales (up 13% year-over-year), $17.4 billion in operating income, and AWS growth accelerating to 20% as AI workloads intensify. From a decade-forward perspective, this company has multiple paths to shareholder value creation.

Netflix: From Subscriber Metrics to Margin Expansion and New Revenue Streams

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) has split three times historically—2-for-1 in 2004, 7-for-1 in 2015, and most recently 10-for-1 in November 2025. The strategic inflection point here isn’t about subscriber counts anymore; it’s about profitability and business diversification.

The ad-supported tier is gaining traction rapidly and is positioned to double its revenue footprint in 2025. Meanwhile, Netflix is testing gaming, live sports events, and merchandise—each representing a distinct revenue stream that incumbents can’t easily defend against. This portfolio approach insulates the company from the natural saturation of streaming subscriptions in developed markets.

The margin story is compelling: Q3 2025 generated $11.5 billion in revenue (up 17% year-over-year) while maintaining a 28% operating margin. Free cash flow surged to $2.7 billion that quarter, with guidance of ~$9 billion for the full year. That’s the cash generation profile of a scale platform, not a growth-stage business scrambling for profitability.

Internationally, there’s still substantial runway. Asia, Europe, and Latin America remain undersaturated, and Netflix’s ability to produce localized originals that achieve global resonance (Squid Game, Stranger Things) creates a sustainable content advantage. The brand itself has become synonymous with streaming—competitors struggle to overcome that positioning.

Netflix has also demonstrated exceptional pricing power, raising subscription costs while absorbing minimal churn. This flexibility hints at genuine customer value and low elasticity. Speculative possibilities—such as strategic content acquisitions—could further entrench its position, though regulatory obstacles remain a consideration.

Nvidia: The AI Foundation with an Ecosystem Moat That’s Difficult to Breach

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has undergone six stock splits, with the most recent 10-for-1 adjustment executed on June 10, 2024. Post-split, shares have appreciated approximately 55%.

The company sits at the absolute center of the AI infrastructure buildout. Its Q3 2026 (ending October 2025) results were staggering: $57 billion in revenue (up 62% year-over-year), with EPS of $1.30. The data center division alone generated $51.2 billion, a 66% year-over-year jump. These aren’t modest growth numbers; they reflect an industry in the early innings of a structural shift.

Nvidia commands an estimated 80-90% share of data center AI chips. GPUs bearing the Nvidia label are the industry standard for training and inference workloads. But the real defensibility lies in CUDA—its proprietary compute architecture. CUDA has become the de facto programming standard for GPU acceleration. Millions of developers globally optimize code for CUDA; entire ecosystems of libraries, frameworks, and tools revolve around it.

This creates a network effect with prohibitively high switching costs. Moving workloads off CUDA requires retraining talent, rewriting code, and rebuilding institutional knowledge—frictions that compound over time. Nvidia reinforces this advantage by continuously optimizing CUDA for its latest GPU generations, ensuring performance leadership that pure hardware competitors struggle to match.

The demand pipeline is extraordinary: $500 billion in backlogs through end-of-2026 for next-generation chips (Blackwell, Rubin architectures). Beyond data centers, Nvidia is expanding into robotics, autonomous systems, and industrial digital twins—markets that could represent trillions in addressable opportunity.

The Decade-Long Thesis: Why These Companies Deserve Your Patient Capital

Stock splits often accompany periods of inflection and investor optimism. These three companies aren’t just riding the AI wave—they’re architecting the infrastructure upon which the wave crashes ashore. Each faces near-term hurdles (regulatory scrutiny, competitive threats, market saturation in pockets), but the fundamental demand tailwinds remain intact.

For investors with a 10+ year horizon and conviction in continued technological disruption, the risk-reward asymmetry tilts favorably. The question isn’t whether these sectors will grow, but which players will dominate that growth. These three have already demonstrated the operational excellence, capital discipline, and ecosystem resilience to sustain leadership across a decade.