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

Barely a day goes by without excitement over artificial intelligence (AI) 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 AI will boost sales. Days later Together AI, a cloud-computing startup, raised new funding at a valuation of $1.3bn, up from $500m in November. One of its investors is Nvidia, a maker of AI chips that is itself on an extended bull run. Before the launch in November 2022 of ChatGPT, a “generative” AI 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.