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Nvidia again passes Apple to become World’s Most Valuable Company. How President Trump and Stargate helped the stock.

MacDailyNews

Jan 22

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Nvidia’s stock price increased at the beginning of Wednesday’s trading session following indications from President Donald Trump that artificial intelligence would be a focus of his new administration. In the initial days of his term, Nvidia experienced significant stock gains, which boosted its market capitalization above Apple’s to reach $3.45 trillion.

Elsa Ohlen for Barron’s:
‎

Nvidia shares are up 2.7% to $144.66 in premarket trading Wednesday. Shares rose 2.3% Tuesday and are up 4.9% so far in 2025.
The stock move doesn’t appear to be linked to any significant policies directly linked to Nvidia, but more about overall sentiment toward AI companies.
Late Tuesday, the White House together with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank announced a multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure plan. The joint venture, called Stargate, would start with a new data center in Texas and investments could reach $500 billion over four years.
On Monday, Trump revoked an order requiring AI developers, that pose a risk to national security, to share any results of safety tests with the government before they are disclosed to the public.

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MacDailyNews Take: One company saw AI. Another, saddled with myopic “leadership” focused on the wrong things and burying the company under layers of stifling bureaucracy, is still pretending it did. The valuations now reflect those facts.

Apple needed new blood years ago, but the old blood simply won’t let go.

Apple was caught flat-footed, due to a lack of vision on the part of leadership… So, the only solution is to partner with a [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.] for the real GenAI stuff while pretending (marketing) really hard that some on-device AI Apple has whipped up in a few months is “insanely great Apple innovation” that’s at the heart of Apple’s 2024’s AI announcements when it’s really just an adjunct… Watch Apple make a big show of its on-device AI at WWDC and run many ads touting it from June onwards.

Apple hopes to buy time for the data center buildouts and investments that will be required for them to someday own their own AI technology and not have to license it from the likes of [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.].

This is what happens after a decade plus with a caretaker CEO at the helm after he hits the last page of his iteration playbook, yet attempts to stay in the game for too long. – MacDailyNews, April 1, 2024

Clearly, Apple is not as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs who even started the company’s work on Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro, but, thanks to Jobs and Cook’s subsequent management of iterations of products and services conceived during Jobs’ tenure, including the retail store buildout which is responsible for a significant portion of Apple’s growth, the company now has more than enough money to make up for Cook’s lack of vision. – MacDailyNews, April 23, 2024

The new “AI features” for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS to be revealed at WWDC is mainly a marketing exercise. The pressure is on Apple’s marketing team to position the company as an innovator in the space (“only Apple does so much on-device AI which enhances users’ privacy to ‘stunning’ effect,” etc.) that also makes “smart partnerships” with other AI companies (OpenAI, for example; even though it’s currently forced to partner if they want to offer any real GenAI features). Now, more than ever, finding themselves so far behind, Apple needs to sell, sell, sell! – MacDailyNews, May 28, 2024

When you’re caught flat-footed like Tim Cook’s Apple, you pop into scramble mode to try to catch up. Early on, you hit it with a big marketing flourish (WWDC24) in order to buy some more time. Then you dribble out features as they get finished and actually exist. Classic vaporware. – MadDailyNews, July 31, 2024

MacDailyNews, September 10, 2024:
‎

Executing a vaporware strategy is an unfortunate necessity without a visionary CEO and it takes time to actually realize (code, test, build out datacenter infrastructure, etc.) a grand marketing vision.
You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years.
Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date.
Sigh.
You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024
Larger displays on iPhone 16 Pro models, and hundreds of millions of iPhones that are 4+ years old, will do the heavy lifting for iPhone sales and iPhone’s average selling price (ASP).

Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, [someday] surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024

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