Amazon has been making big investments in artificial intelligence and a chatbot called Q. Photo / Mark Lennihan, AP, File
Amazon has been making big investments in artificial intelligence and a chatbot called Q. Photo / Mark Lennihan, AP, File
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed US$2 trillion ($3.28t) in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday (today NZT) in New York.
The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3t and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street.
Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI applications and its valuation has soared as a result.
Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology.
Most of the company’s focus has been on business-products, including AI models and a chatbot called Q, which Amazon makes available to companies that use its cloud computing unit AWS.
In April, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said AI capabilities had re-accelerated AWS’ growth and that it was on pace for US$100 billion in annual revenue.
The unit had slowed down in growth last year as companies cut costs amid high inflation.
The tech giant has also invested US$4b in the San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic to develop so-called foundation models that underpin the generative AI systems.
The chief executives: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang; Microsoft's Satya Nadella; Google’s Sundar Pichai. Photo / FT montage, Getty Images
According to Forbes and Google Finance today, seven companies are worth more than US$1t by market capitalisation, which is calculated by multiplying the number of shares by the value of shares.
Of the top seven, one is an oil company and the others are technology companies:
Microsoft, $3.36t
Apple $3.27t
Nvidia $3.11t
Alphabet (Google) $2.28t
Amazon $2.01t
Saudi Aramco $1.78t (6.7t Saudi Arabian Riyals)
Meta Platforms (Facebook) $1.3t
The world’s biggest economies
The values of the world’s big technology companies are rapidly approaching or surpassing the economic output of many national economies.
But GDP is usually just a fraction of total national wealth, which includes household net wealth, infrastructure, and financial and other assets. These are the latest available nominal GDP stats from the International Monetary Fund, not adjusted for purchasing power parity: