Everyone wants to know what AI is worth. One investor looked to the past for the $20 trillion answer.

Who gets the $20 trillion?

It is somewhat more difficult to answer exactly which companies will get the largest slice of the $20 trillion pie.

Hardware companies tend to get the earliest piece, but when the Fundrise analysts broke down all of the studied companies’ returns by wave and their place within the stack, the application layer at the top almost always got the biggest share.

Amazon, for example, would be classified as within the application layer of the internet stack, Instagram at the top of the mobile stack, and Salesforce at the top of the cloud stack.

Eventually, the players closer to the consumer get the most benefit out of each new wave. That is why, Miller explained, the current moment in AI feels so uncertain.

Miller likens the current AI wave to the mobile wave around 2009, when there were few, if any applications for the iPhone. Miller said it’s shortsighted to assume that the return on investment in AI isn’t coming because it’s not here yet.

“The lag is super consistent,” he said.

Nvidia’s share is consistent too. Fundrise estimated the GPU giant’s 2030 market capitalization at $4 trillion and found that working backward, Nvidia’s total share of the AI boom would also value the entire wave at $20 trillion.

History says patience

We’ll have to wait a decade or so to find out if Miller’s team got it right, but they’re not alone in the $20 trillion ballpark.

Analysts at research firm IDC set out on a similar mission but with a very different approach. They used an input, output model — incorporating data from both the supply chain and the end-user side of AI across different geographies. They integrated all of that data into a single multiplier — an amount multiplied by every dollar spent building AI to estimate the total economic input. The method was different and the figure they were aiming for was broader than total market capitalization, but they landed in the same neighborhood: $19.9 trillion in global economic impact.

Miller said his team’s estimates are conservative if anything, since one of the the biggest x-factors is the computing power Nvidia and its frantic competitors are able to generate.

“Nvidia or GPUs are producing more compute faster than Moore’s law. So the question is, if compute is the primary underlying driver of economic activity, economic growth, economic opportunity, then, there’s an argument that it’s actually bigger,” Miller said.