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Microsoft has catapulted Apple into the world’s largest company by market capitalization, as the boom in artificial intelligence marks a new twist in the decades-long competition between the two Big Tech groups.
The company’s stock rose about 1% in early trading Thursday, giving it a market capitalization of $2.87 trillion, slightly outpacing the iPhone maker, whose stock price fell almost 1%.
By midday, Apple had regained the top spot in New York, even as the broader market fell.
Investor excitement about the new wave of generative AI is fueling a rally in shares of Microsoft, the biggest backer of OpenAI, maker of the popular AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT.
Apple has been largely left out of the AI frenzy that has propelled Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest supporter and cloud hosting provider, as well as a pioneer in bringing AI chatbots into its search and workplace products. ing.
At the same time, concerns about weak iPhone sales, particularly in China, weighed on Apple’s stock price in the first few days of 2024, prompting a series of downgrades by Wall Street analysts.
Apple and Microsoft have been rivals since the 1980s, with the company founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak accusing Bill Gates’ Windows maker of plagiarizing the “look and feel” of its Macintosh computer software. did. Apple lost a high-profile copyright case targeting Windows in the early 1990s, paving the way for Microsoft to dominate the PC market for decades.
However, due to the success of the iPhone, Apple’s market value finally overtook Microsoft’s in 2010, and Apple maintained its position for several years as Windows struggled to transition into mobile computing.
Microsoft briefly outperformed Apple during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021, during a remote work boom when factory closures and supply issues disrupted iPhone production. The strength of cloud computing has increased the resilience of the business. But each time, Apple quickly regained the top spot.
While its older rivals are focusing on AI, Apple is aiming to make interactions more natural by leveraging rich 3D graphics and new types of hand gestures with the launch of its new Vision Pro headset next month. We hope to usher in a new era of spatial computing that is both intuitive and intuitive.
Despite hints that Apple is developing the same kind of large-scale language models that power the latest AI chatbots it can run on its devices, ChatGPT’s phenomenal success and efforts to keep up The industry-wide scramble for Microsoft’s cloud services has increased demand. So is his Nvidia processor, which is required to create such tools.
The AI-driven upheaval in the rankings of the world’s top companies has pushed AI chip maker Nvidia’s stock price up about 11% this year, putting it on track to surpass Amazon’s $1.6 trillion market cap.
Not only are market valuations converging, but Microsoft and Apple are also on par in terms of corporate value, which takes into account the cash piles of both companies.
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