Shares of tech giants Meta and Microsoft were soaring Thursday, with the two companies adding a combined $400 billion to their market values.
The two companies together are worth more than JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, or Walmart, the country’s largest retailer, more than seven times over.
For Microsoft, its value briefly crossed $4 trillion, making it only the second company ever to reach that milestone after Nvidia. The company’s market value retreated slightly to $3.97 trillion at the close of trading for the day.
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, is now on the verge of crossing $2 trillion. Meta shares closed 11.25% higher with Microsoft shares up about 5%.
The soaring stock prices come on the heels of better-than-expected financial results, fueled in part by the artificial intelligence revolution. Meta and Microsoft have each added $200 billion to their market value since Wednesday’s close.
Microsoft reported that in the last three months revenue rose 18% to $76 billion, and said it plans to spend more than $30 billion in just the next three months, the majority of which will likely go to the continued expansion of its cloud services to support booming AI usage.
Meta said its revenue surged 22% to almost $50 billion. The number of people who use Meta’s services on a daily basis is now almost 3.5 billion, the company said in a statement. Meta said its total expenses for 2025 will be between $114 billion and $118 billion, much of that likely going to investing in AI and its fleet of data centers around the world to power it all.
Investors will be closely watching another major artificial intelligence player on Thursday afternoon, when Amazon reports its earnings. Amazon’s value currently sits just below $2.5 trillion and its stock was higher by around 2% on hopes that it too will see blockbuster results.
So far this year, shares of Nvidia have soared 30% and Microsoft’s have risen 27%. Meta is also riding the AI wave higher, with its stock seeing a gain of 32% this year.
By contrast, Apple, which was the first company to ever hit $1 trillion, $2 trillion and $3 trillion, has been sinking this year. The iPhone maker’s shares are down 18% as investors and analysts worry that its AI ambitions may be falling short of others such as OpenAI and Microsoft, even though the company often takes a wait-and-see approach to new technologies.
Shares of Alphabet, another trillion-dollar tech giant trying to compete in the AI space, are up only 1.5% for the year. The company has the third-largest cloud service, behind Amazon and Microsoft, and has faced concerns that use of its Google search engine could be declining due to the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT.
In May, an Apple executive testifying in Google’s antitrust trial said traditional searches in Apple’s Safari browser dropped for the first time ever in April. Google said it continues “to see overall query growth in Search.”
At the end of 2023, the total market value of all publicly traded companies in the European Union was about $12.5 trillion. Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft’s values are currently just short of that, at $11.4 trillion.
