Nvidia valuation surpasses India’s total market capitalisation, raising pricing concerns
India mcap falls nearly 20%, while Nvidia climbs to $4.82 trillion
AI dominance drives global capital flows, leaving India as “anti-AI play”
"Are we underpriced?" This question was asked by Harsh Goenka after he brought an uncomfortable dataset back to focus two days ago. The chairman of the RPG Group took to X to highlight that Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based semiconductor giant riding the global artificial intelligence (AI) wave, had eclipsed the combined market capitalisation of every listed company in India.
It is the kind of question that a lot of people were privately thinking but hadn't quite put into words.
1 April 2026
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As of 31 March, Nvidia was valued at $4.24trn—just 3% shy of India's total market capitalisation of $4.37trn. A year earlier, the comparison would have seemed almost absurd.
A year ago, the AI chipmaker's valuation was less than half of India's total mcap. Since then, a sharp rally, driven by record-breaking earnings and unprecedented demand for its chips, has propelled Nvidia's value to levels comparable with the combined mcap of more than 4,000 listed Indian companies, as data presented by Bloomberg shows.
Currently, Nvidia's market capitalisation sits at approximately $4.82trn — firmly ahead of India.
The Great Divergence
India's mcap has declined by nearly 20% from its peak, with an erosion exceeding $1trn amid a record selloff by overseas funds in March. On a free-float basis, Nvidia's mcap is roughly more than double that of India. This is reflected in its significantly higher weight in global indices. In the MSCI All Country World Index — which spans companies across 23 developed and 24 emerging markets — Nvidia commands a top weight of 4.4 per cent, more than three times that of India.
"I never thought I'd live to see this day, where one company of Taiwan, which is TSMC, their weight in the most popular index that everyone uses, the MSCI index, their weight is greater than all of India put together," Ruchir Sharma, chairman of Rockefeller International, pointed out in a conversation with The Indian Express.
India's Missing Piece
The deeper issue is not just a market correction or foreign portfolio outflows. It's structural, and Sharma diagnosed it. "What's happened is that the entire world today has a monomaniacal focus, which is AI," he told The Indian Express. And India, despite its formidable technology workforce, has no compelling story to tell within that frame.
Drawing parallels with the dot-com era of the late 1990s, Sharma noted that the earlier tech boom had at least offered India an entry point through its IT services model. This time, there is no equivalent hook.
"This was always said, by the way, for a long period of time, that our IT is just doing an arbitrage business; it's not actually doing innovative stuff, and we lived with that. But today, that is coming back to haunt us a bit, because we don't have any of that. So, that is the reflection today, that the main reason foreign investment is not coming into India today, because the entire focus is on AI," he said.
The consequence of that absence is not hostility but something arguably worse. "As far as India is concerned, in my 30-year investing history, what I can tell you categorically is I've never seen such indifference towards India. The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference," Sharma said. He added that in financial circles, India is now being referred to as "the anti-AI play" — with the expectation that once the AI bubble ends, India might finally attract attention again.
The R&D Deficit
Behind the indifference lies a more fundamental problem that India has long acknowledged but struggled to fix. India's gross expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP stands at a modest 0.64%, substantially below the global average, according to the Economic Survey 2025-26.
Leading economies such as the US (3.48%), China (2.43%), and South Korea (4.91%) invest significantly more. Private sector involvement compounds the shortfall: in China, the US, and South Korea, business sector contributions to R&D exceed 75%, whereas in India, it accounts for only 41% of total expenditure.
India has engineers, a growing startup ecosystem, a large domestic consumption story, and a digital infrastructure that is genuinely world-class in some respects. Sharma acknowledges that the current AI mania "can't continue" and that the fixation on one theme will eventually ease.
The Nvidia comparison will likely be cited in boardrooms and policy circles for some time. Whether it prompts a rethink of how India positions itself in the global technology conversation — or merely becomes a talking point — remains to be seen.
