One company, the value of a country: the imaginary numbers behind the power of Nvidia

According to him, the market no longer prices Nvidia as a normal hardware company. “He prices it as the infrastructure on which the artificial intelligence revolution is built. The company’s chips are at the heart of the data centers of the technology giants, but its advantage does not end with the processor itself. Nvidia has built an entire system of software, communications and networks around it that makes it very difficult for competitors to replace it.”

Not only the stock markets, but also the comparison with national products illustrates how unusual this size is. Just for the sake of proportion – if Nvidia were a country, it would currently be the third largest economy in the world, behind only the US and China and ahead of powers such as Germany, Japan, Great Britain, India and France, and roughly eight times larger than Israel’s annual GDP. In fact, according to IMF forecasts for 2026, Nvidia’s market value is roughly equal to the combined GDP of all EU member states excluding the seven largest – together, of the countries The tiny ones like Malta and Cyprus to Sweden and Belgium whose GDP is greater than Israel’s.

Nvidia’s networking business already generates tens of billions of dollars a year and has grown at a triple-digit rate. This means that part of the story of the company with the highest value in the world was also written in Israel, through the media and networking activities that grew out of Mellanox.

Last week, Nvidia provided another sign of management’s confidence in the company’s strength. The board of directors approved an additional $150 billion for the share buyback plan. Together with amounts already approved and not yet used, the company has at its disposal approximately 235 billion dollars for the purchase of shares until the fiscal year 2028.

This is also an unusual number. Nvidia’s buyback plan alone is greater than the market value of most companies in the S&P 500 index. For investors, a buyback of this magnitude conveys that the company believes that it has the ability to continue to generate a high flow, even after years of sharp increases in the stock.

However, cautioned Solomon, comparisons between market capitalization and national GDP or to countries’ stock markets require caution. “Germany and France are huge and diverse economies, while Nvidia’s value represents the expectations for the future profits of one company. And yet, the message is hard to ignore,” he concluded. “Six years ago, the German stock market was nine times larger than Nvidia. Today, Nvidia is almost twice as large. Once upon a time, countries represented the main economic power in the capital markets. Today, in the age of artificial intelligence, one company can accumulate in a few years a value that exceeds the stock markets of entire industrialized countries. This is perhaps the figure that best illustrates how deep the revolution is.”