(News Bulletin 247) – The graphics processor specialist has had an impressive trajectory on the stock market. For the Bestbrokers website, the question is not whether Nvidia will reach the $4,000 billion threshold on the stock market… but when.

The launch on November 30, 2022 of ChatGPT, the conversational robot at the origin of the rise of generative artificial intelligence, has changed the history of Nvidia forever. The American group dominates the market for graphics chips, essential for providing the computing power necessary for training and developing large generative AI language models (ChatGPT, Gemini).

And for almost two years, Nvidia has continued to outperform market expectations, with ever more stratospheric results. In its latest quarterly results, Nvidia saw its sales triple over a year while its profit increased sevenfold to $14.9 billion.

A meteoric rise

Meanwhile, competitors are struggling to challenge Nvidia’s hegemony. For example, the American Intel revealed a significant net loss in the second quarter in early August, due to its delay in chips adapted to AI.

The stock market performance of the American group is evidence of this change in dimension. The company saw its share price soar by 143% over the whole of 2024, multiply by more than 10 since October 2022 and shows a dizzying progression over 10 years of more than… 29,000%.

Having entered the stock market in 1999, Nvidia took 24 years to reach the symbolic milestone of $1,000 billion in capitalization (the value of all its outstanding shares). For the other milestones, the Nvidia rocket was much faster. The company exceeded $2,000 billion in capitalization for the first time at the end of February 2024, and $3,000 billion in an even shorter period of time since it was on June 6. It was also during this sixth month of the year that the American group experienced the intoxication of the heights, temporarily becoming the largest listed company in the world.

A trajectory that is simply remarkable for a company that was little known outside tech circles just two years ago, notes the website Bestbrokers.com.

The continuation of Nvidia’s stock market rally will depend mainly on its ability to sustain its unbridled growth. But for analysts at the Bestbrokers website, Nvidia is fully capable of rising much further and especially where no other listed company in the world has yet gone.

Towards $4 trillion and beyond?

According to Bestbrokers’ projections, Nvidia can quickly exceed the symbolic threshold of $4,000 billion. Crossing this threshold is expected at the beginning of 2025. To advance on such a timetable, the site assumes that the stock continues to progress at an average rate of 104.25% per year, starting from a market capitalization of $2,784 billion as of July 29, 2024.

To make its projections, the site sifted through the world’s 50 largest stock market capitalizations as of July 29, 2024, using data from companiesmarketcap.com. Then, Bestbrokers’ experts calculated the year-over-year growth in each company’s market capitalization between 2022 and July 2024, and averaged it. Finally, they applied this average growth rate to each company’s market capitalization as of July 29, 2024.

Coming back to Nvidia, some market observers are still much more optimistic than the experts at Bestbrokers and expect the market capitalization of the American giant to reach… 6,000 billion dollars by the end of this year.

One particularly greedy analyst in his forecasts even sees Nvidia exceeding $50,000 billion in capitalization over the next decade.

“To put things in perspective, a valuation of $50 trillion would exceed the combined market value of all companies in the S&P 500 index, which currently stands at $48.167 trillion, and would be almost double the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States, which stands at $28.78 trillion,” Bestbrokers experts remind us.

Of course, if Nvidia is the favorite, they imagine an alternative scenario in which an unknown company beats the American giant to the punch and crosses the $4,000 billion market valuation mark before it.

“After all, few people could have predicted Nvidia’s remarkable rise in 2022, given that its market capitalization was only $364.18 billion,” the experts point out.

Microsoft, and Apple next?

Who will join Nvidia next? According to calculations by the Bestbrokers website, Microsoft would be the second company to reach this valuation of $4,000 billion. With a current market capitalization of $3,160 billion – $379 billion more than Nvidia – and applying an average annual growth rate of 13.44%, Microsoft should reach this milestone by mid-2026, according to Bestbrokers.

Apple would likely be next if it continues to grow at a rate of nearly 50%, while Meta, better known by its former name, Facebook, is expected to hit the $4 trillion mark by early August 2027.

Google, with a market capitalization of $2.065 trillion and a compound annual growth rate of 10.23%, is expected to be the last to reach $4 trillion, probably in early May of 2031.

What about the Saudi oil major Saudi Aramco, which has long held the third place in the world in terms of market capitalization? Bestbrokers does not anticipate such a promising stock market destiny for the oil major, and is even completely ousted from the site’s projections.

“Our analysis indicates a negative trend in its average growth over the past three years, suggesting that its market capitalization is more likely to decrease than increase,” they point out.

Berkshire Hathaway to reach $1 trillion by January 2025?

If we go back down a little further in this stock market hierarchy, Bestbrokers identifies four contenders for crossing the symbolic threshold of 1,000 billion dollars in the following year.

Warren Buffett’s investment company Berkshire Hathaway is well on its way to reaching this symbolic threshold very quickly, as it has a market capitalization of $947.37 billion at the time of the study. And according to the site, the Oracle of Omaha conglomerate should reach this milestone by the end of January 2025, based on an average growth rate of 12.42% that has been observed on the stock since 2022.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, with a market capitalization of $736.58 billion, and semiconductor maker Broadcom, valued at $706 billion, will likely be the next to join this select club if their market capitalization growth remains unchanged at a rate of 41.29% and 45.17% respectively.

A European group has just joined this largely American ranking, and is also positioning itself as a serious candidate for entry into this closed circle. And it is the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, which should be the first in Europe to cross this threshold of 1,000 billion dollars. Although displaying a market capitalization of 572.01 billion dollars, the first European capitalization ahead of LVMH could overtake Tesla, which is currently worth much more ($748.08 billion). The car manufacturer will not join the ranking before the end of May 2027, according to projections by Bestbrokers.

While this milestone is measured in years for the companies mentioned above, Visa should wait much longer even if the payment solutions specialist is well placed with more than 500 billion in capitalization to its name. But a low annual growth rate of 3.34% is detrimental to it. At this snail’s pace, Visa should therefore reach this major milestone only in… 2045.