(News Bulletin 247) – The oil group Saudi Aramco, long third, has been overtaken by Alphabet and Amazon, according to companiesmarketcap.com. Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia continue to occupy the top three.

With very little difference, the ranking of the ten largest market capitalizations in the world, and therefore the largest groups on the stock market, is dominated by American companies. Only two foreign groups make it into the top 10: the Saudi oil major Saudi Aramco, and the Taiwanese TSMC, the largest foundry in the world for the semiconductor industry.

And, from now on, the top 5 is exclusively American, as noted by several accounts on X (formerly Twitter) including our Investir.fr colleague, Quentin Soubranne.

Saudi Aramco has long occupied third place in the world in terms of market capitalization (i.e. the value of all of its shares). But according to the website companiesmarketcap.com, the oil major has slipped in the hierarchy, and now only occupies sixth place, with 1,955 billion dollars in capitalization this Friday at the beginning of the afternoon, overtaken by Alphabet (1,991 billion) and Amazon (1.966 billion).

These data are also consistent with the market capitalizations given by Yahoo Finance! at the same time.

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Alphabet’s return to form

Nvidia had already knocked the Saudi group off the podium in March. The graphics processor specialist is still third (2,265 billion dollars), ahead of Apple (2,700 billion) which had given up first place at the start of the year to Microsoft, now firmly established at the top of the ranking (3,179 billion). .

Saudi Aramco did not really benefit from the recent surge in oil prices, its stock falling 4.6% over one month. Perhaps due to its very limited free float since only 1.5% of its capital was introduced onto the market in 2019.

This upheaval in hierarchy seems above all to reflect the better form of Alphabet (+13% over one month) and the performance of Amazon which is up 8% over one month and 24.4% over the whole of 2024.

As Bloomberg points out, investors have returned to Alphabet, showing themselves more optimistic about the group’s prospects in generative artificial intelligence, particularly following a presentation this week devoted to the subject in its cloud computing activities. ).

“We come away from the event encouraged by Google’s progress, both in developing its AI capabilities and in bringing the first enterprise solutions to market with new custom chips announced (Axion) and a long list of generative AI services and features within Google Cloud that are expected to support growth over a multi-year period,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote Tuesday.

Amazon in the AI ​​race

As for Amazon, the group had published good results for 2023, and its stock is trading at historic highs. The group has tightened costs and artificial intelligence is also starting to support its business model.

The growth of its “cloud” division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), regained strength in the fourth quarter. Cited by the Financial Times, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company was seeing “significant interest” in its generative artificial intelligence services, but declined to disclose the impact this had on the growth of the cloud.

Amazon also invested an additional $2.75 billion in the generative AI start-up Anthropic at the end of March.

“If investors consider Amazon to be behind Azure (Microsoft’s cloud division, editor’s note) in generative AI capabilities in the cloud, this perception gap could fade as Anthropic capabilities converge with ChatGPT and AWS begins to benefit more from AI-driven demand growth,” Bank of America wrote at the time.