Some projections of the future can appear both ridiculous and reasonable at the same time. The speculative suggestion by the star tech investor James Anderson that the US chip company Nvidia might be worth $49tn in a decade is one.
On the face of it, it seems ridiculous for Anderson (whose Lingotto Investment Management fund owns a lot of Nvidia shares) to suggest that the US chipmaker might one day be worth more than all the companies in the S&P 500 today combined.
Then again, someone will have to make stratospheric returns to justify the extraordinary surge of capital expenditure by the big US technology companies, and Nvidia looks as likely a candidate as any. One analyst has described the business, which produces the graphics processing units that run the artificial intelligence revolution, as the “nerve centre” of the AI system.