The world’s most valuable companies: Amazon crosses US$2 trillion mark
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.
Amazon also makes and designs its own AI chips.
What does Amazon do?
Amazon is a Seattle-based company with a core e-commerce retail business.
It also has a cloud computing unit called Amazon Web Services, and an AI start-up, Anthropic, a competitor to Microsoft-allied OpenAI.
And it also has the Prime Video streaming service, which started showing ads in January.
How much is US$2t?
That’s eight times the size of New Zealand’s economy in this year’s first quarter.
New Zealand’s gross domestic product (GDP) was $410b (US$249.4b) for the year ended March 2024, according to Stats NZ.
It’s also equivalent to about 7 per cent of the entire United States economy.
The world’s most valuable companies
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.
These values can be volatile, as Nvidia showed in recent days.
Of the top seven, one is an oil company and the others are technology companies:
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:
- By NZME and Associated Press
Premium: Amazon turns 30 - but beyond books and e-readers, is it good for the world?