The Daily Chase: NVidia passes Amazon and Google

Here are five things you need to know this morning.

NVidia climbs the ranks: The rise of semiconductor giant NVidia has been fascinating to watch in recent months and years, as the sudden explosion of artificial intelligence has caused demand for the company’s chips to go parabolic. After tripling in value in 2023, the company has managed to add another 40 per cent to its market cap in the first six weeks of 2024 and now finds itself in some truly rarified air.  The company’s dizzying ascent passed a couple of significant waypoints this week, passing Amazon’s market capitalization on Tuesday and then Google parent Alphabet’s on Wednesday. As of the start of trading on Thursday, the company was worth just over US$1.83 trillion, while Alphabet was at US $1.82T. On the leader board, NVidia is now staring up at Apple at US$2.84T and then just Microsoft atop them all, at $3.04T. Truly remarkable stuff for a company that before the pandemic, was worth about US$140 billion — that’s about as much as Canada’s biggest company, the Royal Bank of Canada, is worth today.

Canada’s population surge has a gender gap: Much has been written about Canada’s stunning population surge in recent years, where an immigration boom has seen the country adding hundreds of thousands of working-aged adults every year. That growth leads the G8 and while it’s an enviable problem to have for many developed economies with declining birth rates, it’s come with a host of problems. While the subject has been discussed at length — deservedly so — economist Doug Porter with BMO noted a fascinating new wrinkle on the trend in a report this week, observing that the bulk of new arrivals are men, not women. Canada’s adult male population grew by 3.4 per cent in the past year, Porter notes, while that of women rose 2.9 per cent. That’s a reversal of the trend seen between the late 1970s and roughly 2010, where Canada’s population was skewing more female. In 2022, the gap between men and women was at its narrowest in more than 30 years, but based on the latest numbers, the spread between the growth of the two groups is now at the widest in nearly 50 years of records.

Housing starts in focus: Turning now to something that could do with a surge, we’ll keep an eye on the latest numbers from Canada’s housing agency about housing starts. Policymakers, economists, demographers and the industry itself are in agreement that Canada hasn’t been building enough homes to keep up with its growing population for years now, and the problem actually seems to be getting worse, not better. The CMHC will release its latest data on housing starts, and barring something unexpected, that pace of home construction is likely to fall short of what’s needed to produce the millions more homes we are going to need in the next decade or so.