The shares of the “Magnificent Seven” without exception brought investors profits last year – although the range of price premiums was very high.
And only the securities of Google parent Alphabet and the shares of the artificial intelligence pioneer NVIDIA were able to beat the NASDAQ 100, as was finally shown on Wednesday, the last US trading day of the year. These two companies had particularly high hopes for good business with AI.
Microsoft, Tesla, Meta Platforms, Apple and Amazon, however, lagged behind the US technology index. Here, concerns about the companies’ high valuations were more noticeable than with Alphabet and NVIDIA. Nevertheless, all seven values reached record highs in 2025.
This is how the “Magnificent Seven” performed in detail:
Alphabet A shares +65.3% percent
In September, the company’s market value reached the $3 trillion mark for the first time. Microsoft has now been replaced by Alphabet as the third most valuable company in the rankings. The most important source of money continues to be the advertising business of the search engine Google and the video platform YouTube. Analyst Ron Josey of the bank Citigroup sees an accelerated product development cycle beginning to emerge as the AI-based chatbot Gemini becomes more widespread in both the advertising and cloud businesses.
NVIDIA shares +38.9%
The AI boom continues to grow the business explosively. Driven by this, the chip company has become the most valuable company in the world – well ahead of Apple, which is now half a trillion dollars in size. Nvidia’s chip systems have become a key technology for software with artificial intelligence. They are used both for the complex training of AI models, for example for the chatbot ChatGPT, and for operating the software.
Microsof shares +14.7%
Like the entire technology sector, the software manufacturer Microsoft also suffered from US President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policy at the beginning of the year. The tariff conflict with China in particular unsettled investors. On May 1st, however, good quarterly figures caused a change in mood. Microsoft is on a rapid growth path thanks to high demand for products related to artificial intelligence and cloud services. However, data center capacity is not sufficient to meet the entire demand for cloud services.
Tesla shares +11.4
The electric car manufacturer’s share price initially fell after Trump’s inauguration on January 20th. He hired company boss Elon Musk with the reduction of government spending. The political activities caused investors to fear that he might not pay enough attention to the company in difficult times. In April, however, the price stabilized, and in the following months the market went up again with Tesla; The tech billionaire Musk had initiated his withdrawal from Washington. The price driver is now less the electric car business, but rather Tesla is a big “bet” on the business with robotaxis and humanoid robots.
Meta also caused a price jump with its business figures on May 1st. At the end of October, however, rising investment spending in AI spooked investors. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta aims to lead the industry in available computing power. The capacity of the data centers is being expanded “aggressively” – in anticipation of drastically higher demand through the widespread use of artificial intelligence. The Meta boss has great ambitions to surpass rivals such as ChatGPT developer OpenAI as well as Google and Elon Musk’s company xAI in artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg also had big plans to build a digital parallel universe called “Metaverse”. In December, investors here reacted with relief to budget cuts.
Apple was once the most valuable company in the world, but was replaced by NVIDIA. The iPhone manufacturer recently suffered from growing additional costs due to Trump’s tariffs. Apple devices are mostly built in Asia, such as China, India and Vietnam. High tariffs were gradually imposed on imports from these countries to the USA. Trump and his ministers keep saying that they would like to see iPhone production in the USA. But the supply chains of the entire industry had shifted to Asia years ago.
The retail, media and technology group had significantly more sales in the third quarter, primarily due to strong growth in its AWS cloud division. Jefferies expert Brent Thill, however, expressed skepticism. The order backlog grew weaker. This is particularly important as an early indicator. Analyst Doug Anmuth from JPMorgan bank is more confident: Generative AI and AI infrastructure remain in focus and Amazon is improving its position here. AWS wants to close the AI gap with the competition.