In the U.S. stock market’s Thursday session on January 11, Microsoft briefly surpassed Apple in market capitalization. This momentary shift occurred amidst the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), intensifying the market capitalization competition between the two major American tech giants.
Microsoft witnessed a 1% surge in its software-dominated stocks, pushing its market capitalization to $2.87 trillion USD. Concurrently, Apple, the iPhone manufacturer, experienced a 1% dip, causing a slight lag in its market capitalization compared to Microsoft.
However, by the session’s end, Apple reclaimed its top position in global market capitalization, with the company’s market value bouncing back to $2.89 trillion USD, surpassing Microsoft’s $2.86 trillion USD.
The investment community’s enthusiasm for a new AI technology wave has recently propelled Microsoft’s stock prices. Microsoft, a major shareholder in OpenAI, the creator of the globally recognized AI chatbot ChatGPT, is also a leading provider of cloud hosting services and is pioneering the deployment of AI chatbots in search and workplace products.
On the other hand, Apple, largely absent from the AI trend and facing concerns about declining iPhone sales, especially in China, has led to a downward pressure on the tech giant’s stock prices in the early 2024 trading sessions. In response, many Wall Street analysts have downgraded their assessments of Apple’s stocks.
In reality, Apple and Microsoft have been longstanding rivals since the 1980s when the company founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak accused Bill Gates’ company of imitating the “look and feel” of Macintosh computer software.
Despite Apple losing a notable copyright lawsuit against Microsoft’s Windows operating system in the 1990s, Microsoft dominated the global personal computer (PC) market for decades.
However, the success of the iPhone eventually allowed Apple to surpass Microsoft in market capitalization in 2010, maintaining this lead for several years while Microsoft navigated the challenges of transitioning to cloud computing.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, there were instances when Microsoft briefly exceeded Apple in market capitalization. This period coincided with the robust growth of cloud computing services due to the surge in remote work trends, significantly boosting Microsoft’s business performance. Conversely, Apple faced disruptions in its manufacturing operations as several factories had to close, leading to supply chain bottlenecks. Despite these fluctuations, Apple consistently regained its top position every time Microsoft surged ahead.
While traditional competitors focus on AI, Apple is gearing up to introduce its next-generation augmented reality glasses, Vision Pro, next month. Anticipated to inaugurate a new era of spatial computing, this technology relies heavily on extensive use of 3D graphics and innovative hand gesture styles to enhance the natural and intuitive aspects of interactions.
Signs suggest that Apple is developing substantial language models akin to those powering the latest AI chatbots, intending to run on Apple’s proprietary devices. Nevertheless, the remarkable success of ChatGPT and the concerted efforts of tech companies to keep pace with this chatbot have heightened the demand for Microsoft’s cloud services, along with the essential products from Nvidia necessary for the creation of such chatbots.
The surge in AI has also acted as a driving force for Nvidia, a company experiencing an approximately 11% uptick in its stock price this year, coming close to the $1.6 trillion market capitalization of the e-commerce behemoth Amazon.
By. Pham Thanh Bien
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