It’s fascinating and a little unsettling to see how some corporations today have grown to a scale once reserved only for nations. Take Nvidia, for instance. Its market capitalisation now stands at around US $4.5 trillion, almost equivalent to the entire GDP of India, which is about US $3.9 trillion. One company, valued as much as the output of 1.4 billion people.
Across the Pacific, American investors are still riding an extraordinary wave in technology stocks. The “Magnificent Seven” — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla — together command a market value approaching US $20 trillion, a figure that rivals two thirds of the U.S. economy itself. It’s a level of financial and social concentration we’ve never seen before.
China, on the other hand, took a very different path. When Jack Ma’s Alibaba and Ant Group began to grow too powerful, Beijing stepped in. The message was clear: no company or individual can become larger than the state. It was a brutal reminder that in some systems, the government will always re-assert primacy when power tilts too far toward the private sector.
AI may well be the most transformative leap of our times but if not handled carefully, this euphoria has the making of another dot-com-style reckoning. Yes, a few truly great companies will emerge and redefine the future. The question is: at what cost will that future be built?
