A stamp showing Batman (Getty Images)

Market Vigilantes

Nvidia crosses $5 trillion market cap in early trading as BATMMAAN stocks dominate the market

The eight BATMMAAN names are now worth nearly 40% of the S&P 500, as key AI players take flight once more.

10/29/25 6:07AM

Updated 11/5/25 3:05PM

It’s hardly as if investors need much of an excuse to bid up AI darlings this year, but yesterday Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sent out a pretty big Bat-Signal, telling an audience at the company’s GPU Technology Conference that orders for Nvidia’s Blackwell and early Rubin chips were above $500 billion through 2026, while announcing a bevy of new partnerships with top companies like Palantir, CrowdStrike, and Uber.

That news helped the world’s most valuable company finish the day up 5%, leaving the chip designer with an eye-watering $4.9 trillion market cap.

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Now, Nvidia is gaining once again on Wednesday — currently up 4.8% on heavy trading volumes after a slew of positive analyst coverage, with analysts at UBS bumping their price target for NVDA to $235 and Bank of America’s taking theirs to $275. The company has soared to new heights, with shares touching $210.69 as of 9:45 a.m. ET.

With 24.3 billion shares outstanding, per Bloomberg, that puts the chip designer’s market cap over $5.1 trillion. Some people may not consider the milestone marked officially until it closes above that figure, but for now, it is undeniably true: Nvidia is the first company in history to cross the $5 trillion threshold.

Nvidia’s ascent has been nothing short of remarkable, owing to the 2018 decision from Huang and co. to “bet the farm” on AI. As its data center revenues exploded, the company found itself with the right product, in the right place, at the right time. The company’s staggering market position saw it put up financial results that defied belief: triple-digit percentage growth, margins north of 50%, and all with a workforce the size of a small Ohio town — many of whom are now millionaires. Even being shut out of China due to simmering trade tensions hasn’t stopped the stock from soaring and leaving its Big Tech peers in the dust.

But, while Nvidia is undoubtedly the talisman of the AI trade, it’s hardly alone in profiting from it. With semiconductor giant Broadcom now worth more than $1.75 trillion itself, and given that it (for now) has a more direct contribution to the AI ecosystem than Tesla, I’ve argued before that the Magnificent 7 moniker needs updating to BATMMAAN — a collection of stocks (Mag 7 + Broadcom) that are now worth ~$24 trillion collectively.

That’s a level of market dominance that most investors have never seen before in their lifetimes. Indeed, if you’re buying a sensible market-tracking index like SPY or VOO, just as sage heads such as Warren Buffett might have advised you to do, you are now, implicitly, making a large bet that America’s technology complex will continue dominating in the field of AI, with BATMMAAN now representing nearly 40% of the S&P 500’s total market cap (which is some $61 trillion).

Increasingly, the argument can be made that the BATMMAAN names are really an AI mega-cap basket, with each individual company working hard to associate their story with that of the burgeoning technology:

Nvidia and Broadcom are at the very center of the AI trade, with their chips desired by hyperscalers the world over.
Microsoft is arguably next closest to the metal, with multiple points of exposure to the AI theme. Its Azure division, which provides cloud services, now operates more than 400 data centers across 70 regions — the largest footprint of any cloud provider, per Microsoft — with Azure’s annual revenue surpassing $75 billion over the summer. That’s not to mention, of course, that the company directly owns a huge chunk (27%) of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI directly, and has been pushing its “Copilot” family of tools into its core productivity software suite.
Amazon and Google also compete with Azure, via AWS and Google Cloud — and Alphabet has one of the strongest foundational models in Gemini, a product that’s had a breakthrough summer, and has a major update slated for release in December.
Meta has made some of the most high-profile investments in AI, poaching top AI talent with insane pay packages, and doubling down on its huge capital expenditures as the company builds out its AI infrastructure — which has already helped to propel its advertising machine to new heights.
Much of Tesla’s current market value is ascribed to its future bets on AI-powered autonomous driving and robots — a future which, as Sherwood’s Rani Molla points out, is really hard to build and increasingly expensive.
Apple, meanwhile is the one laggard in the group when it comes to embracing AI — something Wall Street has been willing to forget about in recent weeks after strong iPhone sales.

Interestingly, Broadcom is actually the best performing of the group this year, up 64%, even outpacing Nvidia.

The next test for the BATMMAAN names will be earnings, with five of the group reporting this week: Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet will be after the bell today, and we’ll get Apple and Amazon tomorrow.

Toby Bochan, Luke Kawa

12/12/25

Markets end the week in the red as Broadcom and Oracle concerns drag the entire AI trade down

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 were all negative on Friday.

Matt Phillips12/12/25

Data center trade deep in the red

The data center trade is seeing its steepest sell-off since the market rout that was ignited by President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcement back in April.

Goldman Sachs’ themed basket of AI data center shares was down more than 6% at around 12 p.m. ET, putting it on track for its worst day since the tariff announcement.

Losses hammered seemingly every form of input needed for the sprawling concrete server warehouses at the heart of the investment boom.

Hardware makers including data storage companies like Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings, as well as DRAM maker Micron — some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year — were taking a licking, as were networking stocks Cisco and Arista Networks and data center builders such as Vertiv Holdings and electrical and mechanical contractor Emcor.

Optimism for all things AI has seemed to evaporate throughout the week, as the stock market greeted lackluster quarterly numbers from Oracle and Broadcom with jittery sell-offs and concern about growing debts that could crater cash flows.

Those worries seem to be spreading to ancillary beneficiaries of the AI boom on Friday, gouging a chunk out of charts that retail dip buyers have not — at least so far — stepped in to buy as we head into the weekend.

Luke Kawa12/12/25

Oracle denies Bloomberg report that it’s delaying some data centers for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027

Getting a multi-hundred-billion-dollar backlog for cloud computing revenues from data center projects is easy. Building them is hard.

Oracle extended declines to as much as -6.5% on the day on the heels of a Bloomberg report that the cloud giant has pushed back the completion dates for some of the data centers it’s building for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027, citing people familiar with the work. Oracle denied this report, telling Reuters that there have been no delays to any sites required to meet its contractual commitments and that all milestones remain on track.

Shares had fully pared their report-induced drop ahead of Oracle’s reply, but remain in the red for the day.

Bloomberg said the reported postponement was attributed to labor and material shortages.

Oracle has been spending more on capex than Wall Street had anticipated, leading to higher-than-expected cash burn. Management boosted its full-year capital spending plans by $15 billion after reporting Q2 results earlier this week.

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales came in short of estimates in its fiscal 2026 Q2, a signal that markets already had reason to doubt its ability to quickly turn its humungous RPO (that is, remaining purchase obligations) into revenues.

Traders also seem to be of the mind that potential delays to data center completions are going to limit sales for what goes into them.

Some of the bigger losers since the Bloomberg headline hit the wires include:

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, the latter of which struck a deal to deploy 50,000 of its AI chips in Oracle data centers.
AI REITs like Equinix and Digital Realty.
Server company Dell as well as other AI-geared stocks like Constellation Energy, Arista Networks, Corning, Generac Holdings, Quanta Services, Vistra, and Eaton Corp.

Luke Kawa12/12/25

Broadcom’s post-earnings tumble is weighing on Google’s entire AI ecosystem

Broadcom’s post-earnings plunge is prompting a sharp pullback in Google-linked AI stocks, which had been on fire thanks to the warm reception to Gemini 3.

The stocks getting hit hard:

Celestica, which supports Broadcom’s Tomahawk switch chipset for AI networking.
TTM Technologies, which manufactures the circuit boards that are the foundation for Broadcom’s AI chips.
Lumentum, whose laser technology lets information move around quickly in data centers.

A basket of these Google-linked AI stocks compiled by Morgan Stanley is suffering one of its worst losses of the year. This brisk retreat also follows the release of GPT-5.2 by OpenAI.

Matt Phillips12/12/25

Citi initiates coverage of Planet Labs with “buy” rating

Planet Labs was up after aerospace and defense analysts at Citi initiated coverage with a “buy/high risk” rating and $19 price target.

The stock is up more than 40% this week, after a strong earnings result that spotlighted the company’s growing opportunity in linking its core business of capturing daily images of the planet with AI technologies.

Citi analysts noted the potential for a positive flywheel effect for Planet Labs as it deepens its focus on integrating AI into its offerings:

“AI is accelerating the conversion of pixels to decisions, where Planet’s daily scan and deep archive offer a uniquely large training corpus and broad-area foundation for automation. AI-enabled solutions (MDA/GMS/AMS) are gaining traction with customers such as NATO and the U.S. DoW, validating the approach of integrating AI into broad-area monitoring products... These AI moves create a compounding advantage: more coverage generates more training data, which improves models, which in turn increases product utility and addressable demand.”

The stock has also caught the attention of some of the retail trading crowd, with call options activity spiking on Thursday as traders rode the market reaction to the results.