Nvidia-Apple: the overtaking is short-lived. But AI has bewitched Wall Street

Nvidia's celebrated overtaking of Apple in the Wall Street market cap ranking lasted barely a few hours. A lapse of time in which Jensen Huang's company took second place (behind Microsoft) among the companies with the largest market capitalisation. Then the grid returned to that of recent months. But the numbers, if you look at them carefully, are so tight that it only takes minor fluctuations to change the game again.

At present, Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia are packed into a 'handkerchief' of billions. And there are many unknowns along the way to guess whether the market will concede the stretch to one of the three.

Certainly, the fact that a company like Nvidia (which eighteen months ago boasted a market cap of 300 billion) has broken through the 3 trillion capitalisation wall is sensational news. Not so much for the round figure, which is only valid for number fetishists. But for the hype that artificial intelligence has managed to create. Especially on Wall Street.

Nvidia's boom - we have written about it dozens of times - is linked to its artificial intelligence chips. Above all, its H100 processor, a chip presented at the end of 2022 with the pretensions of being a very powerful GPU, which within a few months became the only one capable of providing the right computing power to the algorithms that run OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence.

Nvidia, which also emerged triumphant from the last Computex (the technology fair held in Tapei over the past few days) is the most shining example of how AI has bewitched Wall Street, in a mix of hype and potential that has shattered caution. A mix that has allowed Microsoft - among the first companies to make the most of generative AI thanks to its investment in OpenAI - to grow by 26% in the last 12 months, ousting Apple from its Wall Street throne.