By AJ Fabino
When an apple falls, it might not make much of a sound, but when shares of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) shift even slightly, everyone can hear it.
Shares of the Cupertino California-based company gained nearly 2.5% on Wednesday to a high of $198.22 before settling around a 0.33% gain. Given Apple’s status as the world’s largest company by market cap, even the fractional movement added and erased billions of dollars of value within hours.
Shares opened Wednesday at $193.10, and with the $198.22 peak, the difference of $5.12 per share from the opening price meant that Apple’s market cap swelled by a staggering $80.83 billion.
To contextualize the truly colossal figure, it’s more than the entire market cap of each of the 2,000 stocks within the Russell 2000 Index.
Apple’s intraday gain passed the total market values of companies like Super Micro Computer Inc (NASDAQ:SMCI), Chesapeake Energy (NASDAQ:CHK), Celsius Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CELH), Snapchat Inc (NYSE:SNAP), Carvana Co (NYSE:CVNA), Palantir Technologies Inc (NYSE:PLTR), Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ:COIN), Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U) and numerous others.
And what about that more modest 0.33% uptick? As inconsequential as it may seem, it amounts to a cool $10.261 billion.
To give you an idea of that kind of money, let’s time travel back to the early 1970s when the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) was constructed. The iconic building that reshaped Chicago’s skyline cost $175 million to build.
The market cap gain Apple saw Wednesday could fund the construction of nearly 59 Sears Towers.
What fueled the pop and drop? Apple’s push into the artificial intelligence arena may have something to do with it. As Zenger News reported earlier, the tech giant is developing AI tools to challenge rivals like OpenAI, Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google and others.
Apple is laying the groundwork for large language models akin to ChatGPT and Google’s Bard through its internally named “Ajax” framework, according to a Bloomberg story. More to that, Apple is said to have developed an in-house chatbot service nicknamed by some as “AppleGPT.”
Produced in association with Benzinga
Edited by Saba Fatima and Maham Javaid