The $10 Trillion Tech Giants: Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple Combined Value the World’s Third Largest Economy

The combined value of the world’s three largest listed companies surpassed $10 trillion (£7.9 trillion) for the first time last night, driven by another surge in the share price of computer chip designer Nvidia.

Nvidia this week overtook tech giant Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company, after surpassing iPhone maker Apple earlier this month.

And yesterday, shares hit an all-time high of more than $140, giving Nvidia a market cap of $3.5 trillion.

Microsoft and Apple are both worth about $3.3 trillion.

It means that if the trio of tech titans were an economy, they would only trail the US and China in size.

But it’s the remarkable rise of Nvidia – whose chips have supercharged the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution – that has really captured investors’ attention.

In February, the company became the fastest ever, going from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Incredibly, it only lasted eight months.

Nvidia then went from $2 trillion to $3 trillion in just 30 trading days from April 24. It means that Nvidia has added a trillion dollars in market value since May 20.

“At 23 trading days, this is the fastest any company has ever added a trillion dollars,” Deutsche Bank analysts said.

Nvidia is worth more than the value of the UK stock market and is almost as large as the annual output of the UK economy.

“Exactly ten years ago, the entire listed UK stock market was 400 times bigger than Nvidia,” Deutsche analysts added. “In the past week, Nvidia has caught up.”

Experts are divided on how much higher Nvidia can go.

“Shares cannot continue to rise in a straight line forever,” said Derren Nathan of investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown.

Nvidia also faces increasing competition from rival chip makers, but counts the world’s next largest companies – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google owner Alphabet – among its customers.

But others point out that Nvidia has essentially cornered the market in both AI hardware and associated software, where revenue growth is likely to be fastest over the next decade.

Rosenblatt Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann thinks Nvidia’s stock could reach $200 for that reason, putting it within striking distance of a $5 trillion price tag.

Investors don’t need to own Nvidia stock directly to benefit from the stock’s stratospheric rise. Technology-intensive funds or trackers that track the U.S. stock market have also benefited, as Nvidia is on track to be the top-performing S&P 500 stock for the second year in a row.