Nvidia balloons to twice the value of Apple

The saying goes that in a gold rush, the only operators sure to make a fortune are the sellers of shovels, since most miners will fail to find any gold. What we are seeing in the AI space feels much like a gold rush, as the monopoly info-tech giants and a crush of start-ups have rushed to harness the golden promises of generative AI. These stretch from Meta’s Metaverse to the incredible number-crunching loads to drive new applications like autonomous driving. The primary shovel-seller in the AI gold rush is Nvidia, designer of the juiced-up chips, and just as importantly, the software ecosystem at the heart of the lion’s share of AI data centres.

In 2025, Nvidia’s success is supercharged further with the availability in volume of its revolutionary 208-billion transistor Blackwell chip, a chip that drives up to a 25-fold increase in performance of AI calculations per unit of energy consumed relative to the prior H100 generation. With the intensifying AI arms race as no giant or even government wants to be left behind, and as AI data centre electricity costs have soared, the insatiable demand for the more powerful and yet less power-hungry Blackwell chips sees Nvidia taking the crown as the most profitable company of all time. It handily surpasses Apple’s record USD 105 billion of profits next year, and with far faster growth baked into expectations, its market cap nearly doubles again, making it twice the size of Apple. This sees it tower above all other companies in the world at a value of USD 7 trillion, or 10% of the global equity market. Apple and other tech giants’ valuations suffer in relative terms, as their profitability is weighed down by the need to build titanic data centres to keep up in the AI gold rush.  

Potential market impact: Nvidia shares trade well north of USD 250, before the market begins to question its potential to grab an ever-greater share of corporate profits, and as unwelcome regulatory scrutiny on its monopoly status tempers the outlook.