The artificial intelligence (AI) frenzy has created a new financial superpower. Nvidia, once known primarily for gaming chips, is now worth more than India’s entire equity market — the world’s fifth largest — highlighting how AI has become Wall Street’s biggest growth story in recent times.
At $5.05 trillion, Nvidia’s market cap overshadows Dalal Street’s $5 trillion valuation. In less than three years, Nvidia’s valuation has surged almost fivefold from $101 trillion as of 2023, driven by its swift transformation from a niche graphics-chip designer into the backbone of the global AI industry and record-breaking earnings.
During this period, Nvidia’s stock has surged from sub-$50 to $211.50, recording 323% increase in price.
Commenting on Nvidia’s meteoric rise, Harshal Dasani, Business Head at INVasset PMS, said that every hyperscaler, every sovereign cloud project, every enterprise racing to deploy large language models needs GPU clusters, and Nvidia controls roughly 80% of that market.
“When compute becomes the bottleneck for an entire technological shift, the supplier of that compute captures an outsized share of the value chain. That is the pattern with infrastructure monopolies, and Nvidia fits it cleanly,” he added.
While Nvidia remains the clear front-runner in the AI race, Big Tech peers like Alphabet and Apple have also reached $4 trillion in market value in recent months. Microsoft, meanwhile, trades above a $3 trillion valuation, having stepped back from the $4 trillion mark hit last year amid a pullback in its shares.
AI-led buying spree has also powered tech giants like Amazon, Broadcom, TSMC, Meta, Tesla and most recently Samsung, beyond the coveted $1 trillion valuation, thanks to the steep demand for its chips. It is only the second Asian company with a market valuation above $1 trillion, aside from TSMC.
| Rank | Company | Country | Market Cap ($ trillion) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | NVIDIA | USA | 5.05 |
| 2 | Alphabet (Google) | USA | 4.79 |
| 3 | Apple | USA | 4.22 |
| 4 | Microsoft | USA | 3.08 |
| 5 | Amazon | USA | 2.96 |
| 6 | Broadcom | USA | 2.01 |
| 7 | TSMC | Taiwan | 1.87 |
| 8 | Saudi Aramco | Saudi Arabia | 1.78 |
| 9 | Meta Platforms (Facebook) | USA | 1.56 |
| 10 | Tesla | USA | 1.50 |
| 11 | Walmart | USA | 1.04 |
| 12 | Berkshire Hathaway | USA | 1.01 |
| Source: Bloomberg | Data as of May 6 | |||
Analysts say the rally reflects strong investor confidence in continued AI spending, although some caution that valuations may be overheating.
The heavy weighting of technology stocks in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 has also pushed both indices to record highs, even amid global uncertainties such as the escalating Middle East crisis.
The Growing Gap
At the same time, India’s market cap has seen a sharp decline from $5.7 trillion at its peak in 2024 to $5 trillion currently, mainly due to relentless selling by foreign portfolio investors (FPIs). In 2025 alone, they sold Indian stocks worth $189.09 billion and another $221.68 billion on a year-to-date (YTD) basis.
Christopher Wood of Jefferies has repeatedly described India as a “reverse AI trade” in recent months, especially in the context of global investors pouring money into AI-linked markets such as the US, Taiwan and South Korea, while India underperformed that rally.
This has been a key reason for FIIs dropping Indian stocks in favour of other markets.
More recently, Ruchir Sharma, chairman of Rockefeller International and founder and chief investment officer of Breakout Capital, told The Indian Express that India looks devoid of any AI “play”, which has made foreign investors “indifferent” towards the Indian markets.
He added that it’s always been said that our IT is just doing an arbitrage business. “It’s not actually, you know, doing innovative stuff, and we lived with that. But today, that is coming back to haunt us a bit, because we don’t have any of that. So, that is the reflection today, that the main reason foreign investment is not coming into India today is because the entire focus is on AI,” he said at Express Adda.
On a similar note, Dasani said that India’s absence from the trillion-dollar club is a function of where domestic tech sits in the value stack. “Indian IT built global delivery scale, but services businesses carry structurally lower multiples than product or platform companies.
While firms like TCS and Infosys are global leaders, they face a “scalability wall” where revenue growth is tied to employee count, said Santosh Meena of Swastika Investmart. In contrast, he observed that trillion-dollar entities like Microsoft or Nvidia own the underlying intellectual property or hardware layers, allowing them to capture massive valuation multiples that are typically unavailable to service-oriented business models.
Disclaimer: This story is for educational purposes only. The views and recommendations made above are those of individual analysts or broking companies, and not of Mint. We advise investors to check with certified experts before making any investment decisions.
