Less than a decade ago, Apple stood alone as the world’s only trillion-dollar company.
Today, the club has grown to over 10 members, with AI infrastructure leaders such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Micron, and Samsung joining long-established technology giants.
That dramatic expansion formed the basis of the latest episode of Zero Sum, where Invezz’s Harsh Vardhan spoke with stock market analyst Wajeeh Khan about why the AI boom has fundamentally reshaped how investors value companies.
AI shifted investor attention from software to the infrastructure powering it
According to Khan, the biggest change brought about by AI wasn’t simply the emergence of new technology companies, it was a shift in what investors considered strategically valuable.
Following ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, the market stopped asking which company had the best consumer product and instead focused on who controlled the hardware needed to build artificial intelligence at scale.
“It wasn’t who had the best product anymore. It was who had the picks and shovels.”
That change helped propel chipmakers and semiconductor suppliers into the trillion-dollar club.
Companies such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Micron, and SK Hynix became some of Wall Street’s biggest winners because they supply the processors, memory, and networking infrastructure underpinning the AI boom.
Even legacy technology companies benefited. Khan argued that firms such as Microsoft and Amazon successfully repositioned themselves around AI, while Apple and Alphabet saw artificial intelligence accelerate businesses that were already among the world’s most valuable.
The AI race has become an infrastructure race
One of the discussion’s central themes was the extraordinary level of investment flowing into AI infrastructure.
The world’s largest technology companies are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centres, custom chips, and cloud infrastructure as they race to meet surging demand for AI computing.
But Khan argued the industry’s biggest bottleneck has already shifted.
“The bottleneck isn’t even the buildings anymore. It’s power.”
Modern AI data centres consume electricity on the scale of small cities, forcing companies to rethink everything from nuclear power agreements to custom chip development and site selection.
The conversation also explored why hyperscalers, including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, are increasingly designing their own AI processors—not to replace Nvidia entirely, but to reduce dependence on a single supplier while improving efficiency for specialised workloads.
Rather than hurting valuations, Khan argued that shortages across the AI supply chain have strengthened the pricing power of the industry’s largest suppliers.
“A shortage doesn’t hurt everybody equally. It devastates the buyer, but it actually enriches the seller.”
High-bandwidth memory (HBM), an essential component used alongside advanced AI processors, is produced at scale by only a handful of companies.
That dynamic has allowed companies such as SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung to raise prices and secure long-term customer commitments as demand continues to outpace supply.
For investors, Khan suggested the AI trade is increasingly becoming a story about scarcity rather than simply technological innovation.
The next challenge for Wall Street may be absorbing trillions of dollars in new listings
While AI has fuelled some of the market’s biggest winners, Khan argued the next phase of the cycle could be shaped by an unprecedented pipeline of public offerings.
Potential listings from Anthropic and OpenAI could collectively introduce trillions of dollars of new equity to public markets over the coming years.
Khan said global markets are likely deep enough to absorb the new supply, but warned that institutional investors may need to rotate capital out of existing technology holdings to participate.
“The rotation risk… it’s still very real.”
That could create temporary pressure on many of today’s AI leaders, even if their long-term fundamentals remain intact.
The episode concludes with Khan’s investment outlook, including why he remains bullish on TSMC’s position at the centre of the AI supply chain, cautious on Oracle’s AI-driven expansion, and why Anthropic’s eventual IPO could become one of the defining moments of the current AI investment cycle.
Watch the full episode of Zero Sum for the complete discussion and subscribe for more conversations on markets, money, and the forces reshaping the global economy.
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