Stash Learn

Investing

Aug 8, 2024

15 Largest AI companies in 2024

By Team Stash
Twitter LinkedIn Facebook
illustrated brain on a digital board

These days, it’s hard to go very long without hearing talk of the rapid evolution of AI technology. With the swift rise in popularity of generative AI chatbots and machine learning-driven services, artificial intelligence is becoming a daily part of ordinary people’s lives, as well as a driving force in the business world. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, rapidly garnered widespread attention. Within months of its public release, the platform has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history, inspiring both awe and concern

But AI technology is far from new, and chatbots are just one application of this advanced tech. Indeed, nearly every industry has been impacted by AI, from healthcare to freight, and this growth shows no signs of slowing down. Prominent tech industry experts like Bill Gates predict the growing influence of AI technology, and current projections estimate that the global AI market is on track to total half a trillion dollars by the end of the decade. Naturally, this growth is attracting attention from investors. If you’re interested in bringing some of the best AI companies by market cap into your portfolio, you may want to get to know the biggest players in the field.


In this article, we’ll cover:


Top AI companies 

Since AI impacts so many industries, the missions of the top AI companies are incredibly diverse, as are the ways they apply this technology, running the gamut from autonomous driving to cybersecurity to application development and more. AI companies also range widely in terms of longevity, with the list of largest companies including long-term tech sector players and newer enterprises alike. These 15 companies represent the largest market cap in the AI space as of summer 2024.

Largest AI companies by market cap as of July 2024:

1. Apple (AAPL)

Apple Inc. is a leading technology company and one of the largest artificial intelligence companies in the world. It is renowned for designing and manufacturing innovative consumer electronics, software, and services, including the iPhone, Mac computers, iPad, and Apple Watch. The company focuses on delivering technology with a strong emphasis on user experience, privacy, and ecosystem integration.

On June 10, 2024, Apple announced “Apple Intelligence,” an artificial intelligence software that incorporates ChatGPT to bring a personal assistant-like feature that integrates into Siri and Writing Tools. These features were initially intended to launch with the upcoming iPhone and iPad 18.0 software overhauls, but will likely be delayed to iOS 18.1. Other features announced in June were the ability to lock and hide apps and schedule texts to be sent at a future time.

  • Market cap: $3.34 trillion
  • Headquarters: Cupertino, CA, USA
  • Founded: 1976
  • AI focus: Electronics, language, and image processing

2. Microsoft (MSFT)

Microsoft has remained a leader in end-user computer technology for nearly four decades and is currently the largest company in the world. Its popular Windows desktop operating system claims approximately 72% of the market share worldwide. 

With a $10 billion investment in OpenAi in January 2023 and subsequent integration of its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot and Dall-E image generation into the Bing search engine and Edge web browsing software, Microsoft has claimed its position as one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies. In June 2024, Microsoft announced a new class of PCs with NPU built into their processors to do more AI tasks without relying on cloud computing.

The company’s cloud-computing infrastructure, Azure, has been growing quickly, driven by Azure AI app development. In July 2024, a DDoS attack caused an Azure outage, which left it offline for more than 10 hours. 

  • Market cap: $3.37 trillion
  • Headquarters: Redmond, WA, USA
  • Founded: 1975
  • AI focus: Web search, image generation

3. NVIDIA (NVDA)

Rounding out the top three AI companies, NVIDIA manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs), whose computing power has been foundational for several generative AI technologies. The company commands 87% of the GPU market and has had a hand in major AI technology advancements, including ChatGPT, which was trained using 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The NVIDIA NeMO LLM’s status as one of the most advanced large language models and a new partnership with Microsoft further cement its place among prominent AI companies.

2024 has been a busy year for NVIDIA, which has seen significant growth as part of the AI boom. In April 2024, the company announced the acquisition of two Israel-based companies, Run:ai and Deci. Then, on June 10, 2024, the company enacted a 10:1 stock split. This essentially means that for every one share of the company’s stock that someone owns, they will now have ten shares. While the overall value of the investment stays the same, each share’s price is reduced to one-tenth of its previous price. 

Several days after the stock split announcement, on June 18, NVIDIA announced its partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise through the NVIDIA AI Computing initiative by HPE, which includes a range of AI solutions they have developed together. This initiative aims to help businesses adopt generative AI technologies quickly by providing integrated products and strategies that leverage companies’ expertise and technologies. 

  • Market cap: $2.64 trillion
  • Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA, USA
  • Founded: 1993
  • AI focus: GPU manufacturing

4. Alphabet (GOOG)

Google’s suite of products extends to many categories in the tech industry, with products that touch on everything from education to advertising and fitness to streaming video. Twenty-five years after the company’s founding, its flagship product remains its eponymous search engine, which reportedly accounts for more than 90% of worldwide searches, an average of 8.5 billion searches per day. Google and its parent company, Alphabet, expanded into AI and deep learning by forming its Google AI division in 2017. 

In 2023, the company announced Bard, an AI chatbot designed to compete with Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. However, the release was slightly marred by reported internal disapproval of the product’s rollout. In May 2024, Google released its latest AI feature, AI Overviews, to everyone using their search engine. The AI Overview seeks to provide more in-depth answers to users’ questions before they even click through to an article listed with search results. After launch, the company temporarily rolled back the feature due to the prevalence of inaccurate AI-generated information. Despite some setbacks with these releases, Alphabet’s quarterly cloud revenues surpassed $10 billion in Q2 2024 for the first time due to their investment in AI innovations.

On August 5th, a federal judge ruled that Google has violated US antitrust law and has acted an a monopoly in the spaces of search and advertising. Google has argued that consumers choose its search engine because it is simply the best, not because of anticompetitive behavior. The ruling is expected to lead to a separate proceeding to determine penalties for Google, which may include monetary fines and operational changes.

  • Market cap: $2.06 trillion
  • Headquarters: Mountain View, CA, USA
  • Founded: 1998
  • AI focus: Web search
mountains
Start investing in AI.

Start today with any dollar amount.

5. Meta Platforms (META)

Recently celebrating twenty years, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has grown to a vast user base, with 3.14 billion people interacting with one of their platforms daily. The company is known for its social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. While the company has faced criticism about privacy concerns since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, misinformation spread across platforms, and general antitrust concerns, Meta has made strides to increase transparency in the past year, especially regarding its ad targeting to users. 

Meta has shifted much of its focus to becoming one of the largest AI development companies in social media and the web. In February 2024, Meta announced its efforts to draw the line between reality and AI-generated imagery and videos on its platforms. The move will notify users when photorealistic content has been AI-generated. In June 2024, the company announced plans to introduce free artificial intelligence chatbots on its messaging platform WhatsApp as a strategy to monetize. It is also in the process of developing multilingual Meta AI for Facebook and Instagram. 

  • Market cap: $1.23 trillion
  • Headquarters: Menlo Park, CA, USA
  • Founded: 2004
  • AI focus: Social networking

6. Tesla (TSLA)

Twenty years after Tesla launched with a vision for reimagining the automotive industry through technology, the company’s Model 3 vehicle stands as the all-time bestselling plug-in electric car. Tesla has also expanded far beyond the automotive industry, becoming one of the largest global suppliers of battery energy storage systems and solar panels. 

Among its innovations are self-driving cars and bipedal robotic units, both of which utilize AI technology to sense conditions and events to pilot themselves with minimal human intervention. CEO Elon Musk has recently revealed plans for next-gen vehicles in the latter half of 2025 and is discussing a $5 billion xAI investment with the Tesla board. 

  • Market cap:  $663.43 billion
  • Headquarters: Austin, TX, USA
  • Founded: 2003
  • AI focus: Vehicular AI, robotics, clean energy

7. Adobe (ADBE)

Founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe is best known for its wide range of creative software products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Acrobat, and Creative Cloud, among others. These products are widely used by professionals and amateurs alike for graphic design, video editing, web development, and digital media creation.

The company had planned to acquire Figma in a $20 billion deal announced in September 2022. However, with pushback in Europe over antitrust concerns, the deal was called off in December 2023. Adobe’s latest launch is its newest AI-powered image generation model, Firefly 3, announced in April 2024. The model brings a new level of high-quality images and a better understanding of user prompts. The company has recently faced backlash over its terms of service and its vague language around Adobe’s generative AI models and the data they’re trained on. Despite the concerns, however, Adobe continues introducing new tools and generative AI features to its Illustrator and Photoshop design software

  • Market cap: $247.88 billion
  • Headquarters: San Jose, CA, USA
  • Founded: 1982
  • AI focus: Creative and marketing software

8. IBM (IBM)

While artificial intelligence may seem new to many, one of the “big 5” AI companies has been innovating for decades. In the 110 years since its founding, IBM has consistently been a cornerstone of the tech industry, producing innovations that have become an ingrained part of everyday life, including the bar code, the hard disk drive, and the personal computer itself. Its Watson question-answering platform, initially developed from 2004-2011, could be seen as the first AI language model technology to attain global notoriety due to its 2011 victory on the quiz show Jeopardy! Since then, its deep learning capabilities have been applied to various industries, including healthcare, cuisine, hospitality, water conservation, and more. 

In the past five years alone, IBM has become one of the world’s leading AI companies, filing 1,591 AI-related US patent applications. In April 2024, IBM announced its acquisition of HasiCorp for $6.4 billion, furthering its cloud capabilities. The company’s AI investments paid off in Q2 2024, resulting in a 4% year-over-year increase in revenue overall and an 8% year-over-year increase in IBM’s software segment.  

  • Market cap: $174.20 billion
  • Headquarters: Armonk, NY, USA
  • Founded: 1911
  • AI focus: Conversational AI

9. Palantir (PLTR)

Palantir Technologies specializes in big data analytics through three major software platforms for the public and private sectors. Each uses artificial intelligence to access information and strengthen correlations between data points. The United States Intelligence Community uses Palantir Gotham to aggregate data for national security purposes, including predictive policing systems. Palantir Metropolis learns and uncovers relationships between data points in private and public databases and is primarily used in the finance industry, perhaps most famously by JP Morgan Chase, to monitor employees. Palantir Foundry is a flexible system that integrates data and can make decisions using generative processes. 

So far in 2024, Palantir has formed partnerships with Starlab Space as the organization’s exclusive provider of AI-driven software to optimize space architecture, TES Forge to drive global decarbonization, the Advanced Research Projects Agency to utilize AI/ML to accelerate health incomes, and several other key organizations. 

  • Market cap: $62.50 billion
  • Headquarters: Denver, CO, USA
  • Founded: 2003
  • AI focus: Data aggregation

10. Mobileye (MBLY)

Mobileye is another artificial intelligence company focused on autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. The company’s technology is employed in vehicles worldwide through high-profile partnerships with Ford, Volkswagen, and Porshe, in addition to 25 other automobile manufacturers. Its products include lane assist, automatic emergency braking, and forward collision, all of which aim to increase the ease and safety of driving. Since its acquisition by Intel in 2017, the company has grown significantly and continued to expand its innovation in self-driving AI technology.

In July 2024, Volkswagen AG awarded its prestigious 2024 Volkswagen Group Award to 10 top suppliers, including Mobileye for Digitalization, recognizing their exceptional cooperation and shared success. The awards highlight the importance of strong partnerships, with Volkswagen emphasizing the 20-year tradition of collaboration and mutual achievements with its suppliers. Despite a strong start to the year, on August 1, Mobileye cut its annual revenue and profit forecasts due to volatile demand in China and a sluggish automotive market worldwide. Mobileye now expects 2024 shipment volume to be between 28 and 29 million, as opposed to their original 31 to 33 million projections. 

  • Market cap: $12.87 billion
  • Headquarters: Jerusalem, Israel
  • Founded: 1999
  • AI focus: Vehicular AI

11. Dynatrace (DT)

The Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform, driven by the company’s proprietary AI technology, Davis, is used in products by large companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The platform monitors software and uses artificial intelligence to detect issues, discover anomalies, and monitor performance. When problems are detected, the software can generate and implement its own solutions without human intervention. 

In 2024, Dynatrace has deepened its ties with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. In April 2024, Dynatrace expanded its partnership with Google Cloud, aiming to accelerate the adoption of both Dynatrace solutions and Google Cloud. The company was also named a winner in the 2024 Microsoft Americas Partner of the Year Awards and, in July 2024, became the first AWS Partner to integrate with the AWS Application Migration Service.

  • Market cap: $12.31 billion
  • Headquarters: Waltham, MA, USA
  • Founded: 2005
  • AI focus: Observability, application security, cloud computing

12. SentinelOne (S)

SentinelOne became an industry leader by leveraging the power of AI for its next-gen cybersecurity software. The company’s AI technology detects abnormal use in endpoint devices and shuts down processes before viruses or bad actors can spread across networks. Its roster of clients includes high-profile brands such as Samsung, Aston Martin, Politico, EA, and Sysco, embedding its products in a number of industries and sectors. 

In January 2024, SentinelOne announced its acquisition of PingSafe, a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). The acquisition is meant to further enhance SentinelOne’s security offerings. On July 12, the company announced expanding its cybersecurity capabilities and client base through a partnership with Aon, leveraging its Singularity Platform to enhance Aon’s ability to assess and mitigate cyber risks through proactive cyber defense, detection, and response.

  • Market cap: $6.36 billion
  • Headquarters: Mountain View, CA, USA
  • Founded: 2013
  • AI focus: Cybersecurity

13. UiPath (PATH)

The defining function of UiPath’s robotic process automation software offerings is the automation of routine business tasks through AI and machine learning. Over the 18 years since the company’s founding, however, its capabilities have expanded significantly, and the software is now capable of executing customer relationship management (CRM) functions and more on a massive scale. UiPath’s financial picture has followed suit, claiming one of history’s largest US software IPOs. With its July 2022 acquisition of Re:infer, the company has added natural language processing to its artificial intelligence arsenal. 

In April 2024, the company was named a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Process Mining, a tool for identifying automation and improving end-to-end business processes. On July 9, UiPath announced a company-wide restructuring to increase efficiency and reduce costs, planning to lay off 10% of its workforce. The company is currently facing a class action lawsuit brought in June 2024 by shareholders who believe stock prices were artificially inflated; how this litigation will affect the company’s performance is yet to be seen.

  • Market cap: $6.53 billion
  • Headquarters: New York, NY, USA
  • Founded: 2005
  • AI focus: Process automation

14. Aurora Innovation (AUR)

Founded by executives from Google, Tesla, and Uber, Aurora Innovation is another of the top AI companies developing self-driving vehicle solutions. It envisions a fleet of autonomous vehicles for applications, including freight and ridesharing. Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, and Volvo are just a few of the manufacturers using Aurora Driver technology. 

In 2022, the company announced the Aurora Beacon platform to help users maximize uptime and address optimization concerns for fleets. It expanded its pilot with FedEx to introduce self-driving technology to the shipping industry. In 2023, it revealed plans to start a driverless truck route connecting Dallas and Houston by the end of 2024. 

At the beginning of 2024, Aurora finalized its truck design, architecture, and hardware for its future lineup of driverless semi trucks in partnership with German auto supplier Continental, starting in 2027. In May 2024, at ACT Expo in Las Vegas, the company and Volvo announced the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck, a self-driving freight hauler with a human safety operator, set to hit the highways this summer.

On August 2, 2024, Aurora Innovation announced that it raised $483 million in its common stock public offering, coming in above its $420 million goal. 

  • Market cap: $6.47 billion
  • Headquarters: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
  • Founded: 2017
  • AI focus: Autonomous driving

15. Tempus AI (TEM)

Tempus AI, founded in 2015 by Eric Lefkofsky, is a health technology company that uses artificial intelligence to advance precision medicine by providing AI-driven solutions for diagnostics and treatment in oncology, cardiology, and depression.

In July 2024, Tempus AI continued to expand its medical AI testing, announcing its new immunology risk-testing product, teaming up with United Therapeutics on research for pulmonary hypertension detection, FDA clearance on AI-based algorithmic testing for AFib testing, and expanded collaboration with Remix Therapeutics on developing small molecule therapies

  • Market cap: $6.43 billion
  • Headquarters: Chicago, IL, USA
  • Founded: 2015
  • AI focus: Health technology

What to consider when researching AI stocks

If you’re enticed by this quick-moving aspect of the tech industry, you may wonder if investing in the top AI companies is the right move for your portfolio. Before you make the leap, make sure to do your research. Like any competitive market, there are a number of factors you might consider before investing.

The company’s financial statements should give you a window into its revenue, profits, debt, and cash flow for a better understanding of its finances. Another factor you may consider is the company’s management: what previous organizations have company leaders worked for? What goals have they set? Have they shown success in achieving them? Investors often also investigate the potential risks associated with a stock, such as the company’s regulatory risks, legal risks, and macroeconomic risks, as well as the volatility of its share prices over time. 

Additionally, since AI technology is rapidly evolving, it may be helpful to follow the news on a company in which you’re planning to invest, as well as the performance of stocks in the tech industry overall.

Ready to invest in the top AI companies?

There are many options for investing in the technology sector, and Stash can help you get started with shares in top AI companies, as well as an ETF focused on robotics. And with fractional shares, you can begin investing with any amount. 

mountains
Start investing in AI.

Start today with any dollar amount.

Top AI companies: FAQs

Which company is leading in artificial intelligence?

There is no single company leading in AI. By market cap, NVIDIA is the largest developer of GPUs used in AI, Apple is the largest company currently integrating AI into its core products, and Tesla is the largest automotive company driving AI innovation. 

What company is leading the AI revolution?

AI innovation is being driven by a number of companies across sectors and applications. It’s possible to argue that NVIDIA is currently leading the AI revolution, as its GPUs are the backbone of many other companies’ AI efforts. NVIDIA is also the third-largest AI company by market cap. 

Who is the largest AI company?

The largest AI company by market cap is Apple, followed by Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Alphabet.

author

Written by

Team Stash

logo

Invest in
yourself.

By using this website you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. To begin investing on Stash, you must be approved from an account verification perspective and open a brokerage account.