2025-07-11T15:02:23z
Nvidia became its first $4 trillion company this week. That moment reminded me of something my tech friend mentioned before moving to the UK earlier this year. There has never been a company like this.
According to the World Bank, 4 trillion dollars is Japan's GDP. Nvidia isn't far behind Germany, the third largest economy in the world. This is a single company with only about 36,000 employees.
Why is Nvidia so valuable? After Freakout, inspired by DeepSeek earlier this year, the industry believes that the AI model will likely need more Nvidia GPUs and associated gear. A new type of “inference” model is particularly expensive to implement. This means there is additional demand for Nvidia's products.
Who buys all of this? Mainly along with cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other large technology and AI companies such as Meta. They are also competing with nvidia, so I call them crazy. The market value of these four giants is combined to reach around $10 trillion. Throwing Apple and Nvidia into that mix is over $17 trillion. It is approaching China's GDP. From six companies based in two medium-sized urban hubs on the northwest coast of the United States.
This compares “flow” with assets, so while I risk lectures from schools of journalism that I have never attended before, it provides an idea of the economic weight of these private organizations. There are other ways to understand its size:
- Profit: Yes, I know, very old fashioned! The net income of these six companies totaled nearly $500 billion in 2024. That's more than half of the US annual defense budget.
- CAPEX: Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google spend around $325 billion primarily on AI data centers. Next is Project Stargate, which includes Openai, Oracle and others, investing at least $100 billion. It was comparable to the (inflation-adjusted) costs of the Inter-U.S. Highway System, taking over 30 years.
- Employee Wealth: Most of these companies employ relatively few people. The 36,000 workers and a $4 trillion valuation represent an unprecedented concentration of wealth.
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