Since this site was launched nine years ago, we have tracked the growing gigantism of the S&P 500. The largest six stocks were initially 14% of the index by market cap, and now they account for a third. There are the cloud-based tech giants – Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle and Meta Platforms – that in the past year have become known as ‘hyperscalers’. Then there is Nvidia, which is in a class by itself.

This site was prescient enough to write about Nvidia back in May 2023, when ChatGPT first made headlines. Having learned about how graphical processing units (GPUs) power machine learning, it was obvious to me that Nvidia was in pole position to exploit the coming generative AI boom, and that turned out to be the case. (In case you were going to ask, no, I did not make an investment in this stock)

Our updated cumulative market cap increase and weighted return charts illustrate what happened. Nvidia turned out to be the ultimate ‘tentpole’ stock holding up the index, contributing $4.2 trillion of the S&P 500’s $20 trillion increase in capitalisation.