The combined value of the world’s three biggest quoted companies topped $10 trillion (£7.9 trillion) for the first time last night, powered by another surge in computer chip designer Nvidia’s share price.
Nvidia this week overtook tech giant Microsoft to become the most valuable company on earth, having leapfrogged iPhone maker Apple earlier this month.
And yesterday the shares hit a record high of more than $140 to give Nvidia a stock market value of $3.5 trillion.
Microsoft and Apple are both worth some $3.3 trillion.
It means that if the trio of tech titans were an economy they would rank only behind the US and China in size.
But it is the remarkable rise of Nvidia – whose chips have turbo-charged the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) – that has really captured investors’ attention.
In February, the company became the fastest ever to go from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Incredibly, it took just eight months.
Nvidia then went from $2 trillion to $3 trillion in only 30 trading days from April 24. It means Nvidia has added a trillion dollars of market value since May 20.
‘At 23 trading days this is the quickest a company has ever added a trillion dollars,’ said analysts at Deutsche Bank.
Nvidia is worth more than the value of the UK stock market and is almost as big as the annual output of the British economy.
‘Exactly a decade ago the entire listed UK stock market was 400 times larger than Nvidia,’ Deutsche analysts added. ‘In the last week, Nvidia overtook it.’
Experts are divided as to how much higher Nvidia can go.
‘The shares can’t keep going up in a straight line for ever,’ said Derren Nathan at investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown.
Nvidia also faces growing competition from rival chipmakers but counts the world’s next biggest companies – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google-owner Alphabet – as customers.
But others point out that Nvidia has, in effect, cornered the market in both AI hardware and associated software, where sales growth is likely to be the fastest over the next decade.
Rosenblatt Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann thinks Nvidia’s shares could hit $200 for that reason, putting it within striking distance of a $5 trillion price tag.
Investors do not need to own Nvidia shares directly to have gained from the shares’ stratospheric rise. Tech-heavy funds or trackers following the US stock market have also benefited as Nvidia is on course to be the best-performing S&P 500 stock for the second year running.
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