U.S. tech giants added $2.4 trillion to their market capitalizations in a year defined by the hype around generative artificial intelligence, according to a new report from venture capital firm Accel.
Accel, in its annual Euroscape report, said the share price values of big technology firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia rose by an average of 36% year over year.
Nvidia joined the trillion-dollar club for the first time, with the U.S. chip giant now worth over $1 trillion. Nvidia’s high-performance chips power many advanced generative AI models, which produce new content from huge volumes of training data.
The world’s biggest technology companies added $2.4 trillion to their market capitalizations in 2023, according to Accel data.
Accel
Accel’s Euroscape index, which includes massive cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) names such as Salesforce, Palantir and Unity, rose 29% in the year to date.
The Euroscape index, which tracks several publicly-listed cloud stocks, is up 29% year-to-date, according to Accel.
Accel
Last year, the picture for cloud and SaaS was grim. Companies saw $1.6 trillion wiped off their value as investors rotated out of high-growth tech stocks, according to Accel. Now, there are signs the pressure is easing.
Faster recovery than after dotcom bust
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite returned to 80% of its all-time high within 18 months, according to Accel, marking a faster bounce back than than after the dotcom bust in the 1990s.
The Nasdaq recovered 80% of its all-time high within 18 months.
Accel
It took the Nasdaq around 14 years to reach that milestone, Accel said.
It took the Nasdaq Composite 14 years to recover 80% of its 2000 peak.
Accel
Public multiples for Euroscape companies are also back to a 10-year pre-Covid average of 6.1-times next-twelve-months revenue. Funding for cloud and SaaS companies in Europe, Israel and the U.S. has also reverted to pre-Covid levels.
Public SaaS and cloud company multiples have reverted back to their 10-year, pre-Covid average, according to Accel.
Accel
“We are in a very different time than 2000,” Botteri told CNBC.
“If you look back at 2000, it really took a long time … for the Nasdaq to get back to 80% of its peak. And now, after the 2021 reset, it only took 18 months to get there.”
The year of AI
AI was the primary technology driving the performance of cloud and SaaS in 2023, according to Accel — and it’s not difficult to see why.
The world has been abuzz with talk about generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude.
“Generative AI is something that is really redefining software,” Philippe Botteri, partner at Accel, told CNBC on a call Friday.
“Any software company is leveraging generative AI, whether they’re just a startup or a new company or an existing company … You should really think about this as something that is pervasive.”
The U.S. led the way in generative AI funding deals, with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic raising billions. OpenAI raised the biggest sum — $10 billion — and Inflection came second with $1.3 billion raised.
The number of new unicorns created in 2023 has reverted back to pre-Covid levels — however, AI is a bright spot with a majority of the unicorns now generative AI companies.
Accel
In Europe, three of the biggest generative AI company rounds came out of France — Hugging Face ($235 million), Poolside ($126 million) and Mistral AI ($113 million).
The number of unicorn companies reverted to pre-Covid levels, with AI taking up a much greater proportion of new billion-dollar companies. In Europe and Israel, 40% of new unicorns were in generative AI; in the United States, it was 80%.
Shifting focus to profitability
This year has been a tough one for tech, with fundraising and valuations dropping sharply as investors grew wary of the sector.
Tech companies tend to prioritize growth and expansion over short-term profits. But investors have been shifting money away from high-growth bets amid higher interest rates, which make the cost of capital more expensive.
Accordingly, the growth rates of Euroscape companies fell from an average of 68% in the first quarter of 2021 to 23% in the second quarter of 2023.
Free cash flow increased on average from -9% to +5% in the same period.
Big Tech takes a beating
This year, deal-making activity from tech giants hit a snag as regulators clamped down on those firms over concerns that they’d become too large.
There were only 10 transactions involving a Big Tech company this year, Accel noted. That’s down sharply from prior years. In 2021, acquisitions led by FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) hit 27, and in 2022 there were 26 Big Tech deals.
The number of Big Tech-led acquisitions declined sharply in 2023 — down from 26 last year.
Accel
One deal that faced a lot of pressure from regulators was Microsoft’s blockbuster bid to acquire Activision Blizzard, the massive video game studio behind hit titles “Call of Duty,” “Candy Crush” and “Crash Bandicoot.”
The two companies finally sealed the deal last week after British regulators gave their blessing. But that was only after a protracted fight between the two parties.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Read more CNBC tech news
In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
Read more CNBC tech news
Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.