Last week, the chipmaker Nvidia hit a valuation of $5tn. Just three months prior, it became the world’s first $4tn company. Microsoft reached a $4tn valuation last week, as did Apple. On a smaller scale, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet all reported their quarterly earnings. The sums were vast. Google’s parent reaped its first $100bn quarter. Amazon reported stellar growth in its cloud computing unit and added 13% to its stock price. Meta faced an unexpected tax bill of $16bn. All of the tech giants, except Apple, revised their capital expenditure figures upward, declaring to their investors that they would spend billions more on the real-world infrastructure that underpins artificial intelligence. The revisions added tens of billions to a total that’s already in the hundreds of billions. Alphabet alone estimated its capital expenditure at between $91bn and $93bn for the upcoming year. That estimate is up from an original declaration of $75bn in February and a revised figure of $85bn announced in July.
Not to be outdone by its publicly traded rivals, OpenAI, recently converted to a for-profit enterprise and mulled an initial public offering at a valuation of $1tn. The world’s most valuable startup has been on a dealmaking spree, signing agreements with Nvidia, which committed to investing $100bn in OpenAI in September; Microsoft, which signed an agreement in early October for OpenAI to spend $250bn on Azure cloud services; and Oracle, another cloud computing giant that OpenAI agreed to spend on in September, this time $300bn. On Monday, the ChatGPT-maker announced a deal with Amazon Web Services for $38bn. In total, OpenAI has promised to spend $588bn in the coming years.
Nvidia’s valuation is now larger than Germany’s entire annual economic output in 2025 ($4.66bn). Put another way, the market capitalization of Nvidia is two and a half times the market capitalization of every publicly traded company in Germany put together, roughly $2.04tn in 2024, per the World Bank. How can one company be worth more than the world’s third largest economy, a nation of 83.5 million people, a country whose economy forms the financial backstop of an entire continent?
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