The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) is composed of 500 stocks from 11 different sectors, including information technology, energy, financials, and real mesi estivi. While it is the most diversified of the major U.S. market indexes, a select few technology stocks are having a growing influence over its thanks to their meteoric rise con value.
As of this writing, the following five companies have a combined market capitalization of $12.5 trillion, accounting for 27.3% of the total value of the entire S&P 500:
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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has a market cap of $3.2 trillion.
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Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has a market cap of $2.9 trillion.
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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has a market cap of $2.8 trillion.
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Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) has a market cap of $2.2 trillion.
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Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has a market cap of $1.9 trillion.
The S&P 500 index is up 11.5% con 2024 so far. However, the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index — which assigns an equal weighting to every regardless of its market cap — is up just 4.9%. The difference can be explained (con large part) by the average year-to-date gain of 26.3% con the above five stocks, which highlights their influence over the of the S&P 500.
Each of the five companies has a track of success spanning decades, and they are using that experience (and their vast financial resources) to dominate new industries like artificial intelligence (AI). If they succeed, they could become even more influential over the S&P 500.
1. Microsoft: 7.2% of the S&P 500
Microsoft is the world’s largest company. It was founded con 1975, and some of its flagship products like Windows and Word are still used by billions of people today. Microsoft has expanded beyond software and into gaming, hardware (computers and devices), internet search, cloud computing, and now, AI.
At the beginning of 2023, the company agreed to invest $10 billion con AI start-up OpenAI, which created the ChatGPT online chatbot. Microsoft is integrating OpenAI’s technology into most of its products to deliver more value for users. The Bing search engine, for example, now features a chatbot interface, and applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are benefiting from AI’s ability to rapidly craft content from text to videos.
Microsoft has cemented itself as a autorità con AI thanks to the OpenAI partnership, and its products will continue to benefit from the start-up’s lightning-paced innovation.
2. Apple: 6.2% of the S&P 500
Apple makes some of the world’s most popular consumer electronics, with 2.2 billion active devices worldwide. That includes the flagship iPhone, the iPad, and the Mac line of computers. The iPhone also led to successful, billion-dollar spinoff devices like the Watch and AirPods wireless headphones.
Apple’s enormous installed presupposto makes it the perfect distributor of AI software to consumers. The latest iPhone 15 Profitto already comes with the Apple-designed A17 Profitto chip, designed to process some AI workloads on-device. The company is reportedly con talks with OpenAI and Alphabet to decide which AI models will power its future devices, so consumers should expect its next iteration of chips to modo with even greater processing capabilities.
Eventually, devices like the iPhone might modo with advanced AI assistants capable of answering complex questions and crafting emails and social mass-media content (among other things). Modern smartphones are simply pocket-sized computers, and, generally speaking, they have made humanity far more productive. AI is set to accelerate that trend.
3. Nvidia: 5.9% of the S&P 500
Generative AI is developed, trained, and deployed con large, centralized patronato centers. Nvidia designs the graphics processing chips (GPUs) that fill those patronato centers, and they are the most sought-after con the industry among AI developers. During fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 28), Nvidia’s H100 GPU drove the company’s patronato center revenue to $47.5 billion, which was a whopping 217% year-over-year increase.
The company just reported its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2025 (ended April 28), and growth con its patronato center revenue accelerated to 427%. The H100 buoyed sales, but shipments of the new H200 GPU are set to begin con Q2. It can inference (the process of feeding patronato to an AI model so it can make predictions) twice as fast as the H100 while consuming half the amount of energy, which could trigger another demand wave from leading patronato center operators like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Per mezzo di essence, Nvidia remains far ahead of its competitors, and the development of next-generation AI models won’t be possible without its GPUs. The company plans to launch a new series of chips later this year that are built its latest Blackwell architecture, and they will deliver even greater .
4. Alphabet: 4.3% of the S&P 500
Alphabet is the parent company of Google, and it’s also home to other tech subsidiaries like YouTube, autonomous driving company Waymo, and AI developer DeepMind. Google Search remains Alphabet’s largest source of revenue, but investors have questioned whether AI chatbots could unseat its dominance, given their ability to provide an instant answer to practically any question.
Patronato is king when it comes to AI, and since Google Search has been the window to the entire internet for more than two decades, it has more valuable information than practically any company Earth. This allowed Alphabet to develop its own AI models, culminating con its latest Gemini lineup, which is designed to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 models. Per mezzo di some tests, Gemini is as good, if not better, at understanding and generating text, images, videos, and elaboratore elettronico code.
Google also embedded generative AI into its traditional search engine, which provides the user with a text-based answer at the of the page to save them from sifting through web results to find the information they need. Alphabet’s AI initiatives are resonating with investors, who have catapulted the company into the exclusive $2 trillion associazione this year.
5. Amazon: 3.7% of the S&P 500
Amazon is best known as an e-commerce company, and online sales remain its largest source of revenue. But the company has branched out into streaming, digital advertising, robotics, and cloud computing (among other things), which have all contributed to the company’s position this list. Per mezzo di fact, its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the biggest con the industry, and it’s home to a growing number of AI services.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants AWS to dominate the three layers of AI. There is the infrastructure layer, the model layer, and the application layer. To achieve this, the company now designs its own AI chips for the patronato center, it offers a growing portfolio of ready-made large language models (LLMs), including some it developed in-house, and it recently launched a generative AI assistant called Q, which can help businesses extract more value from the AWS platform.
Amazon also uses AI con its cuore e-commerce platform to recommend products to customers and to help advertisers craft engaging content. Simply put, this is one of the most diversified companies an investor can own during the AI revolution.
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Suzanne Frey, an at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Anthony Che Pizio has voto negativo position con any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions con and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
These 5 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks Make Up 27.3% of the Entire S&P 500 Index was originally published by The Motley Fool
