Microsoft-Nvidia: who will break through $4 trillion first?

Nvidia, on the other hand, immediately offered the market the best GPUs for powerful AI servers, creating a kind of monopoly for several months due to the quality of its processors.

Now the two companies are competing on the stock exchange, and who knows who will break the historic 4 trillion market cap wall first (the 3 trillion market cap was broken by Apple, which is now in third place and taking a bit of a hit).

The head-to-head is already underway. At the beginning of June, Nvidia overtook Microsoft, briefly becoming the world's most valued company. But the overtaking was short-lived: Microsoft retook the lead. Then Nvidia again. The two titans overtake each other every other day, like sprinters on the final straight, but the track is not a stadium: it is studded with data centres, state-of-the-art chips and waves of enthusiasm from investors.

For Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, 'the race to 4 trillion has begun', as he wrote in a note to clients. Both, he predicts, could hit that mark as early as this summer. But it is only the beginning: 'The technology bull market is still in its early stages, and artificial intelligence is its main driver'.

Of the two, the most impressive is certainly Nvidia. The boom of Jensen Huang's company is impressive: it has added over $2 trillion in value in just 18 months. Its H100 and Blackwell chips have become the equivalent of gold or oil in the AI economy. A crazy story for a company worth just over 200 billion in October 2022.

La crescita di Nvidia a Wall Street

It has to be said that the climb from here on could get steeper. Nvidia risks being held back by export restrictions to China, which was worth about a quarter of its data centre revenues in 2023. And the competition is not sleeping: AMD and Broadcom above all seem to be making a strong comeback in the AI chip market.

For Microsoft, however, it has to defend itself against the combined offensive of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, both of which are increasingly aggressive on the AI-as-a-service front. AWS is focusing on proprietary chips and open-source models, Google on Gemini and integrated solutions for enterprises. Redmond, in short, is both supplier and competitor of its own partners. It will be a very open game.