The myth of rich Germany has collapsed. The numbers are ruthless. “They seem like a country from another era.”
There are numbers so huge that they are no longer associated with the financial market, but with science fiction. Nvidia's business value is now roughly equal to the total annual value of the German economy. After entering the stock exchange, SpaceX could reach levels that would compete with the market value of the entire DAX index (German stock exchange index of the largest companies in terms of share in turnover and capitalization). Analyst reports that are currently circulating in financial markets no longer talk about markets worth billions, but trillions – and sometimes even quadrillions.
It's a contrast that couldn't be more painful. While Germans get lost in the minutiae and argue over whether the new standard should be 48 hours a week or a maximum of eight hours a day for six days, the world is leaving them behind. The United States and the technology sector operate in dimensions that seem utopian to us, Germans.
Germany is managing its own mini economic recovery while parabolic growth is being celebrated elsewhere.
Nvidia published quarterly results on Wednesday evening that make even die-hard gamers look like extras: $81.6 billion. (PLN 298 billion) revenues, an increase of 85%. compared to the previous year, free cash flow of $48.6 billion. (PLN 177.5 billion) – and all this in one quarter. The supervisory board approved the buyout of shares worth another $80 billion. (PLN 292 billion). This is more than the combined market value of the traditional German companies BASF, Bayer and Lufthansa. Jensen Huang, the “godfather of artificial intelligence” and CEO of Nivida, announces an incredible $91 billion for the second quarter. (PLN 332 billion).
According to analysts, every dollar invested in Nvidia chips has a multiplier effect of $8 to $10. (from PLN 29 to 37 billion) in the rest of the technology sector. The stock market values Nvidia at approximately $5.4 trillion. (PLN 19.7 trillion). For comparison: German GDP in 2025 amounted to EUR 4.47 trillion (PLN 16.3 trillion), or approximately USD 4.85 trillion. (PLN 17.7 trillion). A single California semiconductor company is worth more on the stock market than the entire economic output of the world's third-largest economy. That's 84 million German citizens compared to 36,000. Nvidia employees. This is what asymmetry looks like in the era of the platform economy (a business model in which digital platforms mediate between service providers and consumers).
Eight American companies in the top ten
The new hierarchy in the global economy is reflected in the world stock market ranking. There are eight American companies in the top ten, including seven from the technology sector. Nvidia opens the ranking with a value of $5.4 trillion. (PLN 19.7 trillion), followed by Alphabet with USD 4.69 trillion. (PLN 17.1 trillion), Apple with USD 4.44 trillion. (PLN 16.2 trillion), Microsoft with USD 3.13 trillion. (PLN 11.4 trillion) and Amazon with USD 2.85 trillion. (PLN 10.4 trillion). In sixth place is Broadcom, also profiting from the artificial intelligence boom, with a value of $1.98 trillion. (PLN 7.2 trillion).
The first non-U.S. entrant is Saudi Aramco in seventh place, followed by TSMC and then Samsung. German giants? You won't find them among the world's best. The largest German concern, Siemens, ranks 68th in the world, with a market capitalization of EUR 240.68 billion (approx. PLN 1 trillion). SAP ranks 76th with EUR 220.73 billion (PLN 937.2 billion). Then there's a gap. The top three behind them are: Siemens Energy (111th place), Allianz (114th place) and Deutsche Telekom (121st place).
At the very bottom is Volkswagen. The former pride of Germany is squeezing through the eye of the needle in 480th place with a capitalization of EUR 51.91 billion (PLN 220.4 billion) — it almost fell out of the global index of the most valuable companies. The total value of all German shares is just over $3 trillion. (approx. PLN 11 trillion). Four American corporations outperform all German companies.
SpaceX
Elon Musk's space and satellite company SpaceX adds a touch of megalomania to this story, without which big stock stories from the technology industry apparently can no longer do. If it debuted on the stock exchange (it remains a private company), its capitalization could be so huge that it could be compared with the value of all the largest companies making up the German DAX index.
While the DAX as a whole has a market value of over EUR 2 trillion (PLN 8.5 trillion), a sufficiently high valuation of SpaceX itself would pose a challenge to the German leading index: SAP, Siemens & Co. — all together against a company that launches rockets, provides satellites with access to the Internet, and now also wants to send data centers into space. The Total Addressable Market (TAM), or the theoretical total addressable market (the total value of the market a company could serve if it acquired all customers in its category) that SpaceX is targeting, is staggering: $28.5 trillion. (PLN 104 trillion).
It sounds absurd. But this is the kind of absurdity that keeps capital markets soaring in euphoria. Rocket launches suddenly turn into cloud infrastructure. Starlink becomes a global network. Satellites are becoming potential AI computing centers in orbit, powered by solar energy, far from the constraints of the Earth's power grid. By the end of the decade, SpaceX plans to build 100 gigawatts of AI computing power in orbit, using solar-powered AI computing satellites from 2028. This is equivalent to one-fifth of total U.S. electricity production.
The present, however, is still small. SpaceX is associated with rockets, Starlink and a powerful vision of the future. But that's where the tension of this stock market phase lies – the volumes are real, the visions are gigantic, and the valuations are somewhere in between. Anyone who only looks at today's profits does not understand this fantasy. Those who only look at fantasy will miss the risk.
ARK and gigantic predictions
The legendary American investor Cathie Woods from ARK Invest (an American investment fund management company focused on innovative technologies) creates the ideological background for this phenomenon. He calls the new era “The Great Acceleration.” He argues that artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, blockchain and multi-omics will reinforce each other. ARK predicts real growth of 7.3 percent for the global economy. by 2030, while the IMF estimates it at just over 3%.
The message is this – AI is not a sector. It is an accelerator for all sectors. According to ARK, capital investments alone could contribute to annual growth by 1.9 percentage points. annually. Inference costs for artificial intelligence (this is the process in which a trained model “thinks” and generates answers; the costs mainly include electricity, computing power and API query fees) dropped by over 99% in 12 months, and the cost of encoding tokens in eight months dropped from $3.50 to $0.32. (from PLN 12.8 to PLN 1.2) per million tokens.
AI agents double the duration of tasks they can perform autonomously every four months. AI-powered active ingredients could shorten drug development time from 13 to eight years and reduce costs from $2.4 billion to $0.7 billion. (from PLN 8.8 billion to PLN 2.6 billion). Against this background, Germany, with growth rates well below 1 percent, seems like a country from another era.
A ray of hope
While Jensen Huang philosophizes about the fourth industrial revolution, Musk ponders asteroid mining, and Anthropic pays more per month for computing power than some EU research budgets, there is at least one industrial ray of hope in Germany: Siemens.
Munichers control every third industrial machine in the world, have installed over 45 million automation devices, and since 2023 have introduced over 150 products based on artificial intelligence. They have over 2,000 AI patent families and work closely with Nvidia and Microsoft. And yet the value of the shares is only USD 241 billion. (PLN 880 billion), and they are quoted at a significant discount in relation to American competitors, such as Cognex or Keyence. Siemens is a perfect reflection of Germany. It has potential and technological resources, but the global market simply no longer believes that this company can achieve great success.
The inevitable question arises: is this all exaggeration? Probably yes. Technology investment as a percentage of U.S. GDP has reached 1999 levels. If SpaceX had really entered the market with a valuation of just over $2 trillion. (PLN 7.3 trillion), this would go beyond any seriously calculable amounts. This is a classic, textbook signal indicating the late phase of the cycle.
Those who follow ARK Invest should remember that the same company announced a target price for Tesla shares of $4,000 in 2021. (PLN 14.6 thousand), which soon became a laughing stock. The only sober glimmer of hope – the valuations of the six largest technology giants, with an average price-to-earnings ratio of 30, are well below the triple-digit ratios of Cisco, Oracle and Intel at the turn of the millennium.
However, even if this bubble bursts, infrastructure is created from bubbles. The British railway mania of the 1840s ruined thousands of shareholders, but left behind a railway network that accelerated the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The Internet bubble cost hundreds of billions, but it led to the expansion of the fiber optic network on which Netflix and ChatGPT operate today.
If the AI bubble bursts, what will remain are data centers, power grids, models, patents, robotics and automation technology – they will be the driving force behind the next wave of productivity. And perhaps even the first industrial computing power components in space.
But there are also opportunities. Germany as a business location may miss an opportunity. An individual investor does not have to share this fate. Those who diversify globally, adequately incorporate large tech companies, and open themselves to the Nvidia economy will automatically participate in this change. Semiconductor ETFs like iShares MSCI Semiconductors (WKN: A2AGSG), Invesco EQQQ Nasdaq-100 ETF (WKN: 801498) or simply Vanguard FTSE All World ETF (WKN: A2PKXG) are covering most of this acceleration.
The world now thinks in trillions. Germany discusses working hours. Anyone who dismisses this as a speculative bubble is missing the infrastructure cycle behind it.
