Just how rich are businesses getting in the AI gold rush?

Barely a dayAIAIAIAIGPTAIAI AI AIAIAI goes by without excitement over sending another company’s market value through the roof. This month the share price of Dell, a hardware-maker, jumped by over 30% in a day because of hopes that will boost sales. Days later Together , a cloud-computing startup, raised new funding at a valuation of $1.3bn, up from $500m in November. One of its investors is , a maker of chips that is itself on an extended bull run. Before the launch in November 2022 of Chat, a “generative” that responds to queries in uncannily humanlike ways, its market value was about $300bn, similar to that of Home Depot, a home-improvement chain. Today it is $2.3trn, $500bn or so shy of Apple’s.The relentless stream of headlines makes it hard to get a sense of which businesses are real winners in the boom—and which will win in the longer run. To help answer this question has looked where value has accrued so far and how this tallies with the expected sales of products and services in the “stack”, as technologists call the various layers of hardware and software on which relies to work its magic. On March 18th many companies up and down the stack descended on San Jose for a four-day jamboree hosted by Nvidia. With talks on everything from robotics to drug discovery, the shindig showed off the latest innovations. It highlighted furious competition between firms within layers of the stack and, increasingly, between them.