For the first time in history, three of the five most valuable assets on earth are not things you can hold in your hand. The market has not gone haywire, it has simply updated its definition of what the world runs on. Writes Ken Oidamae Tobiko, an investment consulting analyst based in Nairobi.
Ten years ago, comparing NVIDIA's market capitalisation to silver's would have been a category error. Silver is a precious and monetary metal, held by central banks, worn as jewellery, and traded for five millennia. NVIDIA is a graphics card company worth USD 10 billion at the time. The comparison would have been absurd.
Today, it is the most instructive conversation in global capital markets and that is only half the story.
As of May 2026, three of the world's five largest assets by market capitalisation are technology companies. NVIDIA sits at USD 5.5 trillion, ahead of silver's USD 5.0 trillion. Microsoft and Apple follow.
Only gold, untouchable at USD 32.7 trillion, and silver hold the line for the physical world. This looks like a structural shift happening in plain sight.
For most of financial history, the top of the global asset ranking was dominated by things you could hold. Gold. Silver. Oil. Land. The idea that a company, susceptible to market forces and liabilities could sit alongside precious metals as pockets of stored value would have seemed strange to any 20th century economist.
However, the two assets closest to gold, NVIDIA and silver, have been leapfrogging each other for months and since March, the gap has since widened to roughly USD 550 billion in NVIDIA's favour.
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The deeper question lies in why three technology companies now belong in a conversation that used to be reserved for physical assets with tangible value.
The answer is infrastructure. Microsoft, Apple, and NVIDIA are not just consumer technology companies in the traditional sense, they are the operating system of the global economy.
Microsoft runs the productivity and cloud backbone of most of the world's enterprises. Apple controls the device layer through which over a billion people access digital commerce and communication and the second most valuable asset in the world. NVIDIA, manufactures the chips that power the AI systems now embedded in nearly every industry on earth.
Increasingly these companies are the battery packs powering the flows of information, compute, and commerce that the modern economy cannot function without.
Do Physical Assets Still Matter?
Most definitely. Gold and silver have three properties no technology companies possesses: they cannot go to zero, they cannot be disrupted, and they carry a 5,000-year track record.
In conditions of genuine financial stress, the kind that sends equity markets down 30–50%, silver holds value while stocks collapse.
Additionally, a credible competitive breakthrough, a regulatory intervention, or a simple valuation mean-reversion could compress any of the three technology giants significantly. Precious metals would remain.
But we cannot be blind to the shift. Winston Churchill once said that "the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." The history of global asset rankings is the history of economic eras.
Agricultural societies stored wealth in land. Industrial economies valued oil and steel. The financial era elevated bonds and blue-chip equities. In each transition, the assets at the top of the rankings were the infrastructure of the dominant productive system. The markets were simply reflecting, in price, what the world could not function without.
That logic has not changed. What has changed is what infrastructure means. Compute power, software ecosystems, and device networks are becoming as foundational to the 2020s economy as electricity grids and railways were to the 1930s.
The market has not gone haywire by placing three technology companies in the global top five. It has updated its definition of what the world runs on.
Whether these valuations hold is the central investment question of the decade. But the direction of the signal is clear. The world has begun repricing what it considers foundational, and for the first time in history, three of the five most valuable assets on earth are not things you can hold in your hand. Follow the value.
