Source: NetEase Technology
Author: Xiao Xiao

On September 8, on Thursday local time in the US, the investment company Needham Securities released a research report saying,$Amazon (AMZN.US)$,$Alphabet-A (GOOGL.US)$/$Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$with$Microsoft (MSFT.US)$are the three biggest winners in the field of generative artificial intelligence, and$Apple (AAPL.US)$It is then left behind, and it is possible to lose the title of “the technology company with the highest market capitalization.”

Needham Securities analyst Laura Martin (Laura Martin) wrote in the report that although Apple is currently the largest company in the world, the development trend of artificial intelligence is likely to disrupt Wall Street's power ranking.

Analysts believe that Apple lacks a strategy for generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLM), which is the foundation of chatbot services such as ChatGPT, which makes Apple's situation precarious.

The growth of artificial intelligence may cause Apple to be surpassed by the three giants Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Martin believes all three companies are more mature players in this rapidly growing field.

All four major technology companies are members of the so-called “trillion dollar market capitalization club,” yet Apple's market capitalization is as high as 2.77 trillion US dollars, accounting for more than 7.2% of the weight of the S&P 500 index.

By comparison, Microsoft's market capitalization is slightly less than 2.5 trillion US dollars, while Google's parent company Alphabet has a market capitalization of 1.7 trillion US dollars, and Amazon's market capitalization is 1.4 trillion US dollars.

Martin said that although Apple is ahead of other companies, it “is not a core beneficiary of the generative AI trend because it is not an arms dealer.” She added that while Apple can “protect its best-in-class ecosystem,” Alphabet will eventually surpass Apple in scale “thanks to cloud business, generative artificial intelligence, and first-party global consumer data.”

Martin wrote that Microsoft and Amazon have a first-mover advantage in big language models, and “latecomers in this field are bound to fail.” She added that Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet all have huge cloud businesses and can run big language models in a more cost-effective way, which gives them an advantage in AI competition.

Alphabet and Amazon stocks both performed better this year$NASDAQ 100 Index (.NDX.US)$, increases of more than 50% and 60%, respectively. Meanwhile, the tech-dominated Stark 100 index rose 39% in 2023. Apple and Microsoft stock prices have also risen strongly, but their performance so far this year has lagged slightly behind the SDAQ 100 index.

Apple's stock price fell 3.2% on Thursday, with a cumulative decline of 6.7% over the past two trading days.

editor/tolk