We have all grown used to Big Tech breaking records, and we all – almost – became numb to hearing valuations in the billions of dollars. Yet one milestone still deserves a pause.
Nvidia’s valuation recently exceeded $5 trillion, making it the first company in history to do so. Microsoft and Apple hover around $4 trillion each. Together, the top three are worth over $10 trillion – more than the entire economies of Japan and Germany combined (about $8.5 trillion in nominal gross domestic product). If these companies were a country, they would rank third globally, behind only the US and China. That’s not just a headline – it’s a historic shift in how value and power are created.
At this valuation, these companies move beyond being mere corporations, and become sovereign-scale entities. Market value is not GDP, but it signals power, and influence is now migrating from national capitals to corporate headquarters. The larger-than-life executives shape global norms on privacy, security and even diplomacy – often faster than governments can legislate. What used to be a technological “arms race” between nations has been extended to a capability race between states and businesses. Whoever controls compute, data and talent pipelines defines the next era of competitiveness.
From an economics and business perspective, the $10 trillion figure should shock us into clarity. It is not merely “Big Tech getting bigger”, and it is not about a bubble (which it might be). It does, however, mark the moment when knowledge, data and compute to become the world’s primary economic flywheel – the new foundation of productivity and national power. The old phrase “data is the new oil” now feels quaint.
In fact, let us look at the value of real oil. The five largest oil and gas companies – Saudi Aramco ($1.7 trillion), ExxonMobil ($500 billion), Chevron ($310 billion), PetroChina ($250 billion) and Shell ($220 billion) – together total just below $3 trillion. The market has spoken: data and compute are the new electricity – and increasingly, the oxygen of growth. Electricity made industrialisation continuous; compute makes innovation continuous. Ironically, the one thing data needs most is still energy. So both data and oil will grow in importance. Data centres already consume an estimated 4 per cent of global electricity and are projected to double that by 2030.
For investors, AI infrastructure looks like the next great earnings engine, despite the speed of value concentration posing many risks. A handful of platforms now dominate global equity indices, compressing diversification. Betting only on enablers – chipmakers, cloud giants and foundries – has been the main focus for now, but the next wave of returns may come from translators: companies that convert AI models into tangible productivity across energy, finance, logistics, health care and government. In the long run, those downstream applications could contribute more to real economic growth than the enablers themselves.
On the flip side, such valuations at this scale raise deeper social and political questions. When a single company becomes “this rich”, it starts becoming the economic centre of gravity, pulling in the best talent, drawing global capital and shaping supply chains in its image. Some of this is healthy dynamism and success should be rewarded. However, this might also amplify inequality if workers are displaced faster than new industries absorb them into new jobs and professions, while startups and universities may find themselves priced out of access to compute and data.
For the Middle East and Africa, the strategic question is how to build the ecosystem that makes such scale possible in our region. That means universities must push research frontiers and forge deep talent networks that compete and collaborate. Also, governments should invest more (much more) in research and development, offer patient capital and enforce predictable rules for growth.
The region today has a window of opportunity to turn resource wealth into knowledge wealth. Oil once conferred geopolitical power; in the AI era, it is compute capacity, design capability and innovation ecosystems that define sovereignty. The nations that align academia, government and private capital to create this flywheel will not just host the next trillion-dollar firms – they will reshape where global power resides.
Building this knowledge wealth starts with investing in knowledge. Any nation that wants to build its own digital champions – or even maintain bargaining power in a world of compute scarcity – must invest in the upstreams: maths education, semiconductor literacy, open research, energy infrastructure and the legal plumbing that turns ideas into companies fast.
That is the real lesson from Nvidia at $5 trillion: not just how high markets can go, but how far nations must climb to stay relevant.
