CHART: Mining vs AI – Nvidia sneezes, sheds five BHPs

A year ago this week Nvidia became the first company to touch $4 trillion, and MINING.COM ran the numbers against the combined worth of the world’s 50 most valuable mining companies. It was not even close.

The chip designer was worth 2.7 times the MINING.COM TOP 50 (and since valuations quickly shrink outside that, probably twice the entire global mining industry).

This year Nvidia has been having the kind of quarter miners unfortunately know all too well. 

After peaking at roughly $5.5 trillion in the middle of May, the stock shed about $1 trillion over the next eight weeks. At the bottom of the slide, Nvidia was briefly trading at 18 times forward earnings – below the S&P 500 average, which made the poster child of the AI age, at least technically, a value stock.

The chipmaker’s P/E is now back near 20 times forward earnings, but mining’s majors change hands for barely 13 – cheaper on next year’s profits than Nvidia managed to look even at its bargain-bin bottom and despite all the criticality chatter surrounding mining. 

The TOP 50 had a quarter of its own. A record $2.4 trillion at the end of March, before gold’s slip back below $4,000 an ounce took $228 billion off the ranking, or for the Mag 7 slash Lag 7, a bad Friday afternoon. 

The scoreboard now reads $5.11 trillion versus $2.19 trillion. Nvidia is worth 2.3 times the top 50 miners, down from 2.7 times last July, and for a few sessions this month the multiple flirted with two – territory last visited when cheap and cheerful DeepSeek gave the AI trade its first proper scare. 

Over the past twelve months mining even outgrew the machine – up 47% against Nvidia’s 27% – a first in the short history of this exercise. 

But to return to theme of mainstream investors not valuing the production of copper the same way as the production of hallucinations about the production of copper here’s a sobering thought:

What Nvidia shed between mid-May and early July — nearly five BHPs, and BHP has never been worth more — was about what the whole Top 50 was worth for most of this decade.

Renaming everything critical minerals was a good start (and kudos to met coal and lead for making the list), but it’s time to launch a worldwide public/investor awareness campaign. What about this old nugget for a tagline: If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined. 

That includes, for the record, the silicon, copper, gold, silver, tungsten, tantalum, titanium, cobalt, aluminium, tin, nickel, hafnium, ruthenium, molybdenum, indium, palladium, gallium, germanium, arsenic, antimony, bismuth, boron, phosphorus, cerium, lanthanum, yttrium, gadolinium, europium and praseodymium that Nvidia’s chips are made from.