Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.

The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.

“As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue,” Greg Silverman, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI software.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.

Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.

Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.

However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.

For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.

Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

WATCH: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ should have another good earnings season

Microsoft‘s Build developer conference kicks off on Tuesday, giving the company the opportunity to showcase its latest artificial intelligence projects, following high-profile events this month hosted by OpenAI and Google.

One area where Microsoft has a distinct advantage over others in the AI race is in its ownership of Windows, which gives the company a massive PC userbase.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that 2024 will mark the year when AI will become the “first-class part of every PC.”

The company already offers its Copilot chatbot assistant in the Bing search engine and, for a fee, in Office productivity software. Now, PC users will get to hear more about how AI will be embedded in Windows and what they can do with it on new AI PCs.

Build comes days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its most powerful AI model yet and showed how its Gemini AI will work on computers and phones. Prior to Google’s event, OpenAI announced its new GPT-4o model. Microsoft is OpenAI’s lead investor, and its Copilot technology is based on OpenAI’s models..

For Microsoft, the challenge is twofold: keeping a prominent position in AI and bolstering PC sales, which have been in the doldrums for the past two years following an upgrade cycle during the pandemic.

In a recent note on Dell to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote that he remains “bullish on the PC market recovery” due to commentary from customers and recent “upward revisions to notebook” original design manufacturer (ODM) builds.

Technology industry researcher Gartner estimated that PC shipments increased 0.9% in the quarter after a multi-year slump. Demand for PCs was “slightly better than expected,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the company’s quarterly earnings call last month.

New AI tools from Microsoft could offer another reason for enterprise and consumer customers to upgrade their aging computers, whether they’re made by HP, Dell or Lenovo.

“While Copilot for Windows does not directly drive monetization it should, we believe, drive up usage of Windows, stickiness of Windows, customers to higher priced more powerful PCs (and therefore more revenue to Microsoft per device), and likely search revenue,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to investors on April 26, the day after Microsoft reported earnings.

While Microsoft will provide the software to handle some of the AI tasks sent to the internet, its computers will be powered by chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm for offline AI jobs. That could include, for example, using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize a transcription without a connection.

The key hardware addition to an AI PC is what’s called a neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are designed to specifically handle artificial intelligence tasks. Traditionally, they’ve been used by companies like Apple to improve photos and videos or for speech recognition.

Microsoft hasn’t said what AI PCs will be capable of yet without an internet connection. But Google’s PIxel 8 Pro phone, which doesn’t have a full computer processor, can summarize and transcribe recordings, recommend text message responses and more using its Gemini Nano AI.

Computers with Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chips with a dedicated NPU are expected to arrive in late 2024. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip with an NPU will be available in the middle of this year, while AMD’s latest Ryzen Pro is expected sometime during the quarter.

Intel says the chips allow for things like “real-time language translation, automation inferencing, and enhanced gaming environments.”

Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them in its new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is expected to launch in the next round of Macs sometime this year.

Qualcomm, unlike Intel and AMD, offers chips powered by Arm-based architecture. One of Microsoft’s sessions will talk about “the Next Generation of Windows on Arm,” which will likely cover how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and how that’s different from Intel and AMD versions of Windows.

Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD at 13%, according to recent data from Canalys.

In the past, Qualcomm has promoted Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting their longer battery life, thinner designs and other benefits like cellular connections. But earlier versions of Qualcomm’s chips were limited in what they offered consumers. In 2018, for example, the company’s Snapdragon 835 chip couldn’t run most Windows applications. 

Microsoft has since improved Windows to handle traditional apps on Arm, but questions remain. The company even has an FAQ page dedicated to computers running on ARM hardware. 

Microsoft will also be hosting sessions like “AI Everywhere” covering how to “accelerate generative AI models” on devices that run in the cloud. 

An “Azure AI Studio” session will look at how developers can create their own Copilot chatbots, which may be similar to what Google and OpenAI are doing with Gemini and ChatGPT. Imagine, for example, a company creating a chatbot that can help employees select health benefits.

WATCH: Investing in the future of AI

Apple has struck a deal with Arm through 2040 and “beyond,” Arm said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing Tuesday.

The news indicates that Apple has secured access to a core piece of intellectual property, the Arm architecture, used in its iPhone and Mac chips, for the foreseeable future.

Arm, owned by SoftBank, is set to debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the coming weeks at a total valuation that could be as high as $52 billion, which would be the biggest technology initial public offering this year.

For Arm, its note about the Apple deal indicates that at least one of its most important partners will continue to use the company’s technology for years, quelling some fears that the change in Arm’s corporate structure could prompt some of its customers into looking for technological alternatives.

“Further, we have entered into a new long-term agreement with Apple that extends beyond 2040, continuing our longstanding relationship of collaboration with Apple and Apple’s access to the Arm architecture,” Arm said in its updated SEC filing.

Arm’s architecture is used in nearly every smartphone chip, including Apple’s A-series for iPhones. Arm’s instruction set outlines how a central processor works at its most basic level, such as how to do arithmetic or access computer memory. Switching large software projects to other instruction sets is expensive, difficult and time consuming.

Arm, originally founded in 1990, started growing fiercely after the iPhone came out in 2007 and smartphone makers needed chips that were geared for low-power usage, especially compared with the x86 architecture used in PC and server chips by Intel and AMD.

One reason firms such as Apple use Arm’s architecture is because it has not been owned by a competitor. Arm, a British company, licensed its technology to all comers, and its customers could plan to invest billions in developing Arm chips without worrying that their access to the technology could be curtailed.

The company said 250 billion chips have shipped using Arm’s architecture, although about half the company’s royalties revenue comes from products released between 1990 and 2012, according to the filing.

Concerns over access to Arm technology is one of the main reasons regulators blocked Nvidia’s bid to buy Arm early last year, leading to this fall’s IPO.

Apple, Google, Nvidia, Samsung, AMD, Intel, Cadence, Synopsis, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company have expressed interest in buying some Arm shares as part of the offering, as much as $735 million in total according to the filing, which would give those companies a stake in Arm’s ownership and some say in how it is managed. They’re referred to as “cornerstone investors.”

An Arm representative declined to comment and referred to the SEC filing. Apple representatives didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

of Samsung the brand is everywhere. From Galaxy phones and smart TVs to washing machines and refrigerators, the company says its products can be found in nearly three-quarters of US households.

But Samsung is much more than gadgets and appliances, and there’s another reason why it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. It is the second largest manufacturer of chips that power so many popular devices.

For more than three decades, Samsung has been the leader in memory chips used to store digital data. But it was a market in turmoil. Memory chip prices have fallen over the past year and are expected to fall by as much as 23% more in the current quarter. Samsung reported dismal first-quarter earnings in April, with profit falling to its lowest level since 2009.

Samsung responded by reducing production of memory chips. Elsewhere in the industry, smaller rival Micron said recently it expects to cut 15% of its workforce.

Amid the wreckage, the giant company found growth in another corner of the semiconductor market, doubling down on its foundry business, the country that makes custom chips for massive customers like Qualcomm, Tesla, Intel and Sonyas well as thousands of smaller players.

Samsung is building a $17 billion chip manufacturing plant, or factory, in Taylor, Texas, where it is promised to begin the first American production of advanced chips next year. Applications opened in February for companies like Samsung to get their share of the $52.7 billion CHIPS and Science Act, passed by lawmakers last year to bring chip manufacturing to the US after 30 years of losing market share to Asia.

Samsung is also adding capacity in its home country of South Korea, spending $228 billion on a mega cluster of five new factories scheduled to come online by 2042.

“They spend and spend and spend,” said Dylan Patel of the research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis. “And why is that? So that they can catch up with technology, so that they can continue to maintain their leadership position.”

Samsung is one of only three companies to produce the world’s most advanced chips, ranking second only to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and ahead of Intel.

Now Samsung is aiming to catch TSMC.

“We’re not settling for being No. 2,” John Taylor, Samsung’s corporate vice president of factory engineering, said in an interview. “Samsung never settles for No. 2 as a business, as a company. We are very aggressive.”

The company announced an ambitious new roadmap in October, pursuing a goal of tripling its flagship manufacturing capacity and making industry-leading 2-nanometer chips by 2025 and downscaling to 1.4-nanometer by 2027.

“If Samsung hits their targets, they will leapfrog TSMC, but that’s a big if,” Patel said. “TSMC is the only one the industry trusts to deliver on their roadmap.”

CNBC recently entered Samsung’s Austin chip factory for the first in-depth tour given on camera to an American journalist. While there, we got a rare interview with the head of Samsung’s US chip business, Jinman Han.

A 34-year veteran of the company, Hahn’s U.S. oversight includes foundry operations and the memory chip business.

“We really want to be a foundation for American industry,” Hahn told CNBC.

Samsung started 85 years ago when founder Lee Byung-chull established it as a trading company to export fruits, vegetables and fish in Korea.

“His vision was for our company to be timeless, strong and powerful,” Khan said. “So he chose the name Samsung, which literally means three stars.”

To survive two major wars, the company diversified into industries such as textiles and retail. Samsung Electronics was established in 1969, the first Samsung TV came out in 1972, and two years after that Samsung bought Hankook Semiconductor in a bold attempt to create the vertically integrated consumer electronics giant that the company is today.

Samsung opened its first US offices in New Jersey in 1978. By 1983, it was producing 64KB dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips commonly used in computers, and the company had a new US office in Silicon Valley.

Lee Kun-hee took over after his father’s death in 1987, and Samsung’s first mobile phone arrived a year later. And now Samsung is the world’s largest smartphone vendor, going head-to-head with An apple.

Just a decade after making its first memory chip, Samsung hit the market with a version that had 1,000 times the capacity. It gained international recognition in 1992 with the world’s first 64MB DRAM chip, putting the company at the top of the memory market, where it remains today.

“Its presence is so ubiquitous in South Korea that they call their country the Republic of Samsung,” said Jeffrey Kane, author of the book Samsung Rising, published in 2020.

Samsung began manufacturing chips in the U.S. with its factory in Austin, Texas, which opened in 1996. It opened a second factory in the Texas capital in 2007. Today, Samsung’s Austin operation is entirely devoted to foundry.

Samsung’s expansion brought with it some legal conflict.

In 2018, the company finally ended a seven-year legal battle with Apple over whether Samsung copied the iPhone. Terms were not disclosed.

“Apple got paid by Samsung, so Apple technically won,” Cain said. “But when you add up all the legal costs, all the battles, all those years, it was just a neutral zero to zero for both sides.”

The challenges are not limited to the courtroom.

Protests erupted in South Korea over J.I. Lee, the third generation of Samsung’s founding family, taking the helm. He served time in prison for bribery before being pardoned in August and becoming executive chairman in October.

And during the pandemic, Samsung was hurt by global chip shortages as demand peaked and supply chains were disrupted.

“It was really painful,” Hahn said. “When you see your customers asking for more chips, but there’s no way to provide them, it was so painful.”

That dynamic is changing. As consumers curb spending in the face of rising inflation, demand for memory chips has weakened sharply. Han said Samsung’s internal data analysis showed that “the market will probably recover by the end of this year.”

Investors have already returned. Shares have fallen nearly 30% in the past year, along with the broader decline in the global technology industry. The stock has risen 28% this year and hit a 52-week high on June 5 on the Korea Stock Exchange. Morgan Stanley recently named it a top pick.

Part of the rally may reflect the latest chapter in the geopolitical chip war between China and the US

In May, China banned products from US memory maker Micron, sending Samsung shares tumbling. The US also granted Samsung a one-year exemption from operating its two chip factories in China, despite new rules in October that stop many chip companies from exporting their cutting-edge technology to the world’s second-largest economy.

Samsung says it is adding capacity in Taylor, Texas, which is northeast of Austin, due to demand in the US. More than 90% of modern chips are currently manufactured in Taiwan.

“Bringing Taylor on board will simply increase their ability to source their chips domestically and not have to go to parts of the world where they might experience some discomfort,” said Samsung’s John Taylor.

Over the past three decades, the US share of global chip production has fallen from 37% to just 12%. That’s largely because estimates show it costs at least 20 percent more to build and operate a new factory in the U.S. than in Asia, where labor is cheaper, the supply chain is more accessible and government incentives are much larger.

For Samsung’s Texas expansion, environmental concerns are high and growing.

The highest-priced equipment Samsung will bring to Taylor is likely the $200 million EUV lithography machines manufactured by ASML. They are the only devices in the world that can engrave with sufficient precision for the most advanced chips.

Each EUV machine is designed to consume about 1 megawatt of electricity, which is 10% more than the previous generation. One study found that Samsung used more than 20% of South Korea’s entire solar and wind power capacity in 2020.

“Electricity is the lifeblood of the semiconductor factory in a sense,” said Patel of SemiAnalysis. “There have been numerous instances where the electricity has gone out and companies have had to eliminate months of production.”

Texas’ energy grid is largely cut off from its neighbors, limiting its ability to borrow across state lines. In 2021, that grid failed during an extreme winter storm, leaving millions of Texans without power and causing at least 57 deaths.

“I’ve already signed 12 pieces of legislation to make the electric grid more reliable, more resilient and more secure,” Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott told CNBC in April. “And so we can definitely ensure that any business that moves here will have access to the energy they need, but at a low cost.”

Water is another major necessity for chip factories. In 2021, Samsung used about 38 billion gallons of water to make its chips. Approximately 80% of Texas remains affected by drought.

“We have the Texas Water Board working on that and legislation we’re working on this session to make sure that with the growing population in Texas, we’ll be able to provide the water needs not only for businesses, but for our growing population as well.” , Abbott said.

Samsung told CNBC that its goal in Austin is to reuse more than 1 billion gallons of water by 2023. At the new Taylor factory, the company aims to recycle more than 75 percent of the water it uses.

All the buzz in tech lately has been around AI models to power services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These applications require even more powerful processors, mostly made from now Nvidia.

“There are more and more people around the world who can make memory chips,” Cain said. “To stay ahead of the game, you need to get into the newer logic technologies.”

Cain said he sees Samsung “diving deeper into the logic chip segment. So, [that’s] AI chips, the future applications of semiconductor technology.”

When asked what’s next, Samsung’s Taylor said the company eventually plans to add more chip manufacturing capacity at its 1,200-acre site in Texas.

“We only have one factory listed there right now,” he said. “But there’s plenty of room for more.”

Watch the video for a behind-the-scenes look at Samsung’s chip factory in Austin and the construction project in Taylor, Texas.

The Nasdaq just wrapped up its fifth consecutive week of gains, jumping 3.3% over the past five days. It’s the longest weekly winning streak for the tech-heavy index since late November 2021. After its worst year since 2008, the Nasdaq is up 15% through early 2023.

The last time tech stocks enjoyed a rally this long, investors were bracing for the electric car maker of Rivian blockbuster IPO, the US economy was closing in on its strongest year of growth since 1984, and the Nasdaq was trading at record highs.

There’s a lot less champagne this time around. Cost-cutting has replaced growth on Wall Street’s checklist, and tech executives are touted for efficiency over innovation. The IPO market is dead. Redundancies abound.

Earnings reports were the story of the week, with results coming from many of the world’s most valuable technology companies. But the numbers, for the most part, weren’t good.

An apple missed grades for the first time since 2016, Facebook parent Meta recorded a third consecutive quarter of declining revenues, Googlethe core advertising business declined and Amazon ended its weakest year of growth in its 25-year history as a public company.

Although investors had mixed reactions to the individual reports, all four stocks closed the week with solid gains, as Microsoftwhich reported earnings the previous week and issued vague guidance to forecast revenue growth this quarter of only about 3%.

Meta was the best performer of the bunch this week, with the stock jumping 23%, its third-best week on record. In Wednesday’s earnings report, revenue came in slightly above estimates, even as year-over-year sales fell, and the first-quarter forecast was roughly in line with expectations.

Key to the rally was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s earnings call that 2023 will be the “Year of Efficiency” and his promise that “we are focused on becoming a stronger and more agile organization.”

“It’s really been a game changer,” Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors, said in an interview Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“The quarter itself was OK, but they finally bought into the cost cutting and so I think Metta really took off,” she said.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that times are changing. From the year of its IPO in 2012 to 2021, the company is growing between 22% and 58% annually. But in 2022, revenue fell 1%, and analysts expect growth of just 5% in 2023, according to Refinitiv.

On the earnings call, Zuckerberg said he doesn’t expect the declines to continue, “but I also don’t think it’s going to go back to where it was before.” Meta announced in November that it would cut 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.

Link said the reason Meta stock had such a big jump after earnings was because “expectations were so low and the valuation was so compelling.” The stock has lost nearly two-thirds of its value in the past year, far more than its mega-cap peers.

Apple, which fell 27% last year, gained 6.2% this week despite reporting its steepest drop in revenue in seven years. CEO Tim Cook said the results were impacted by a strong dollar, manufacturing issues in China affecting the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max and the overall macroeconomic environment.

“Apple is doing pretty well in this admittedly very difficult environment overall,” Dan Flax, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, told “Squawk Box” on Friday. “As we move through the coming months and quarters, we will see a return to growth and the market will begin to reflect that.” We continue to like the name even in the face of these macro challenges.”

Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy, ​​who will succeed Jeff Bezos in mid-2021, took the unusual step of joining the earnings call with analysts on Thursday after his company posted a weaker-than-expected first-quarter forecast. In January, Amazon began layoffs that are expected to result in the loss of more than 18,000 jobs.

“Given that this past quarter was the end of my first full year in this role, and given some of the unusual parts in the economy and our business, I thought this might be a good thing to join,” Jassi said during the the conversation.

Cost management has become a big topic for Amazon, which grew rapidly during the pandemic and later admitted it had hired too many people during that period.

“We’re working really hard to streamline our costs,” Jassi said.

Alphabet is also in downsizing mode. The company announced last month that it was cutting 12,000 jobs. Its fourth-quarter earnings miss included disappointing YouTube sales due to a pullback in ad spending and weakness in its cloud division as businesses tighten their belts.

Ruth Porath, CFO of Alphabet, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bossa that the company is meaningfully slowing its hiring pace in an effort to ensure long-term profitable growth.

Alphabet shares ended the week up 5.4%, even after giving up some of their gains during Friday’s selloff. The stock is already up 19% for the year.

If the Nasdaq continues its uptrend and posts a sixth week of gains, it will match the longest rally in a period that ended in January 2020, just before the Covid pandemic hit the US

Investors will now turn to earnings reports from smaller companies. Some of the names they will hear next week include Pinterest, Robin Hood, Confirm and Cloudflare.

Another area in tech that boomed this week was the semiconductor space. Like consumer technology companies, there hasn’t been much growth to excite Wall Street.

AMD on Tuesday beat sales and profit, but pointed analysts to a 10% year-over-year revenue decline for the current quarter. Intel, AMD’s main competitor, reported a disastrous quarter last week and forecast a 40% drop in March sales.

Still, AMD jumped 14% for the week and Intel rose nearly 8%. Texas Instruments and Nvidia also posted good profits.

The semiconductor industry is facing a glut of spare parts at PC and server makers and falling prices for components such as memory and CPUs. But after a miserable year in 2022, stocks are rebounding on signs that easing Federal Reserve rate hikes and falling inflation will give companies a boost later this year.

WATCHING: Watch the full CNBC interview with Truist’s Youssef Squali

An apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that Apple will buy US-made microchips at an event in Arizona on Tuesday, where President Joe Biden also spoke.

Cook said Apple will buy processors made at a new factory in Arizona, according to a video of the event.

“And now, thanks to the hard work of so many people, these chips can proudly be stamped ‘Made in America,'” Cook said. “This is an incredibly important moment.”

The chip factories will be owned and operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the largest foundry company with more than half of the world’s market share. TSMC makes the most advanced processors, including the chips in the latest iPhones, iPads and Macs.

The plants will be able to produce 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer chips, which are used for advanced processors such as Apple’s A-series and M-series, and Nvidiathe graphics processors of.

“Today is just the beginning,” Cook said. “Today, we combine the expertise of TSMC with the unmatched ingenuity of American workers. We are investing in a stronger and brighter future, planting our seed in the Arizona desert. And at Apple, we’re proud to help fuel its growth.”

“Apple had to buy all the advanced chips from overseas, now they’re going to bring more of their supply chain home,” Biden said. “This could be a game changer.”

Cook tweeted on Tuesday that Apple would be the site’s “biggest customer.”

TSMC currently does most of its manufacturing in Taiwan, which has raised questions from U.S. and European lawmakers about securing supplies in the potential event of a Chinese invasion or other regional problems. Chip companies like Nvidia and Apple design their own chips, but outsource manufacturing to companies like TSMC and Samsung Foundry.

Arizona factories will be partially subsidized by the US government. Earlier this year, Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, which includes billions of dollars in incentives for companies that build chip manufacturing facilities in the US.

TSMC said Tuesday it will spend $40 billion on the two plants in Arizona. The first plant in Phoenix is ​​expected to produce chips by 2024. The second plant will open in 2026, according to the Biden administration.

TSMC’s plants will produce 600,000 wafers a year when fully operational, enough to meet annual U.S. demand, according to the National Economic Council.

The US plants will be a small part of TSMC’s total capacity, which produced 12 million wafers in 2020.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said in remarks Tuesday that AMD plans to be a significant user of the TSMC Arizona factories.

American chip company Intel has also said it wants to compete for Apple’s business and is building chip factories in Arizona and Ohio that are expected to be partially subsidized by the CHIPS Act.

Last year, Intel said it would act as a foundry for other companies, although its manufacturing capabilities currently lag behind those of TSMC. This makes Intel less attractive for the fastest chips.

It seems like an eternity ago, but it’s just been a year.

At this time in 2021, the Nasdaq Composite had just peaked, doubling since the early days of the pandemic. Rivian’s blockbuster IPO was the latest in a record year for new issues. Hiring was booming and tech employees were frolicking in the high value of their stock options.

Twelve months later, the landscape is markedly different.

Not one of the 15 most valuable U.S. tech companies has generated positive returns in 2021. Microsoft has shed roughly $700 billion in market cap. Meta’s market cap has contracted by over 70% from its highs, wiping out over $600 billion in value this year.

In total, investors have lost roughly $7.4 trillion, based on the 12-month drop in the Nasdaq.

Interest rate hikes have choked off access to easy capital, and soaring inflation has made all those companies promising future profit a lot less valuable today. Cloud stocks have cratered alongside crypto.

There’s plenty of pain to go around. Companies across the industry are cutting costs, freezing new hires, and laying off staff. Employees who joined those hyped pre-IPO companies and took much of their compensation in the form of stock options are now deep underwater and can only hope for a future rebound.

IPOs this year slowed to a trickle after banner years in 2020 and 2021, when companies pushed through the pandemic and took advantage of an emerging world of remote work and play and an economy flush with government-backed funds. Private market darlings that raised billions in public offerings, swelling the coffers of investment banks and venture firms, saw their valuations marked down. And then down some more.

Rivian has fallen more than 80% from its peak after reaching a stratospheric market cap of over $150 billion. The Renaissance IPO ETF, a basket of newly listed U.S. companies, is down 57% over the past year.

Tech executives by the handful have come forward to admit that they were wrong.

The Covid-19 bump didn’t, in fact, change forever how we work, play, shop and learn. Hiring and investing as if we’d forever be convening happy hours on video, working out in our living room and avoiding airplanes, malls and indoor dining was — as it turns out — a bad bet.

Add it up and, for the first time in nearly two decades, the Nasdaq is on the cusp of losing to the S&P 500 in consecutive years. The last time it happened the tech-heavy Nasdaq was at the tail end of an extended stretch of underperformance that began with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Between 2000 and 2006, the Nasdaq only beat the S&P 500 once.

Is technology headed for the same reality check today? It would be foolish to count out Silicon Valley or the many attempted replicas that have popped up across the globe in recent years. But are there reasons to question the magnitude of the industry’s misfire?

Perhaps that depends on how much you trust Mark Zuckerberg.

It was supposed to be the year of Meta. Prior to changing its name in late 2021, Facebook had consistently delivered investors sterling returns, beating estimates and growing profitably with historic speed.

The company had already successfully pivoted once, establishing a dominant presence on mobile platforms and refocusing the user experience away from the desktop. Even against the backdrop of a reopening world and damaging whistleblower allegations about user privacy, the stock gained over 20% last year.

But Zuckerberg doesn’t see the future the way his investors do. His commitment to spend billions of dollars a year on the metaverse has perplexed Wall Street, which just wants the company to get its footing back with online ads.

The big and immediate problem is Apple, which updated its privacy policy in iOS in a way that makes it harder for Facebook and others to target users with ads.

With its stock down by two-thirds and the company on the verge of a third straight quarter of declining revenue, Meta said earlier this month it’s laying off 13% of its workforce, or 11,000 employees, its first large-scale reduction ever.

“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” Zuckerberg said.

Mammoth spending on staff is nothing new for Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg was in good company on that front.

Software engineers had long been able to count on outsized compensation packages from major players, led by Google. In the war for talent and the free flow of capital, tech pay reached new heights.

Recruiters at Amazon could throw more than $700,000 at a qualified engineer or project manager. At gaming company Roblox, a top-level engineer could make $1.2 million, according to Levels.fyi. Productivity software firm Asana, which held its stock market debut in 2020, has never turned a profit but offered engineers starting salaries of up to $198,000, according to H1-B visa data.

Fast forward to the last quarter of 2022, and those halcyon days are a distant memory.

Layoffs at Cisco, Meta, Amazon and Twitter have totaled nearly 29,000 workers, according to data collected by the website Layoffs.fyi. Across the tech industry, the cuts add up to over 130,000 workers. HP announced this week it’s eliminating 4,000 to 6,000 jobs over the next three years.

For many investors, it was just a matter of time.

“It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people,” Brad Gerstner, a tech investor at Altimeter Capital, wrote last month.

Gerstner’s letter was specifically targeted at Zuckerberg, urging him to slash spending, but he was perfectly willing to apply the criticism more broadly.

“I would take it a step further and argue that these incredible companies would run even better and more efficiently without the layers and lethargy that comes with this extreme rate of employee expansion,” Gerstner wrote.

Activist investor TCI Fund Management echoed that sentiment in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, whose company just recorded its slowest growth rate for any quarter since 2013, other than one period during the pandemic.

“Our conversations with former executives suggest that the business could be operated more effectively with significantly fewer employees,” the letter read. As CNBC reported this week, Google employees are growing worried that layoffs could be coming.

Remember SPACs?

Those special purpose acquisition companies, or blank-check entities, created so they could go find tech startups to buy and turn public were a phenomenon of 2020 and 2021. Investment banks were eager to underwrite them, and investors jumped in with new pools of capital.

SPACs allowed companies that didn’t quite have the profile to satisfy traditional IPO investors to backdoor their way onto the public market. In the U.S. last year, 619 SPACs went public, compared with 496 traditional IPOs.

This year, that market has been a bloodbath.

The CNBC Post SPAC Index, which tracks the performance of SPAC stocks after debut, is down over 70% since inception and by about two-thirds in the past year. Many SPACs never found a target and gave the money back to investors. Chamath Palihapitiya, once dubbed the SPAC king, shut down two deals last month after failing to find suitable merger targets and returned $1.6 billion to investors.

Then there’s the startup world, which for over a half-decade was known for minting unicorns.

Last year, investors plowed $325 billion into venture-backed companies, according to EY’s venture capital team, peaking in the fourth quarter of 2021. The easy money is long gone. Now companies are much more defensive than offensive in their financings, raising capital because they need it and often not on favorable terms.

“You just don’t know what it’s going to be like going forward,” EY venture capital leader Jeff Grabow told CNBC. “VCs are rationalizing their portfolio and supporting those that still clear the hurdle.”

The word profit gets thrown around a lot more these days than in recent years. That’s because companies can’t count on venture investors to subsidize their growth and public markets are no longer paying up for high-growth, high-burn names. The forward revenue multiple for top cloud companies is now just over 10, down from a peak of 40, 50 or even higher for some companies at the height in 2021.

The trickle down has made it impossible for many companies to go public without a massive markdown to their private valuation. A slowing IPO market informs how earlier-stage investors behave, said David Golden, managing partner at Revolution Ventures in San Francisco.

“When the IPO market becomes more constricted, that circumscribes one’s ability to find liquidity through the public market,” said Golden, who previously ran telecom, media and tech banking at JPMorgan. “Most early-stage investors aren’t counting on an IPO exit. The odds against it are so high, particularly compared against an M&A exit.”

There have been just 173 IPOs in the U.S. this year, compared with 961 at the same point in 2021. In the VC world, there haven’t been any deals of note.

“We’re reverting to the mean,” Golden said.

An average year might see 100 to 200 U.S. IPOs, according to FactSet research. Data compiled by Jay Ritter, an IPO expert and finance professor at the University of Florida, shows there were 123 tech IPOs last year, compared with an average of 38 a year between 2010 and 2020.

Buy now, pay never

There’s no better example of the intersection between venture capital and consumer spending than the industry known as buy now, pay later.

Companies such as Affirm, Afterpay (acquired by Block, formerly Square) and Sweden’s Klarna took advantage of low interest rates and pandemic-fueled discretionary incomes to put high-end purchases, such as Peloton exercise bikes, within reach of nearly every consumer.

Affirm went public in January 2021 and peaked at over $168 some 10 months later. Affirm grew rapidly in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as brands and retailers raced to make it easier for consumers to buy online.

By November of last year, buy now, pay later was everywhere, from Amazon to Urban Outfitters‘ Anthropologie. Customers had excess savings in the trillions. Default rates remained low — Affirm was recording a net charge-off rate of around 5%.

Affirm has fallen 92% from its high. Charge-offs peaked over the summer at nearly 12%. Inflation paired with higher interest rates muted formerly buoyant consumers. Klarna, which is privately held, saw its valuation slashed by 85% in a July financing round, from $45.6 billion to $6.7 billion.

The road ahead

That’s all before we get to Elon Musk.

The world’s richest person — even after an almost 50% slide in the value of Tesla — is now the owner of Twitter following an on-again, off-again, on-again drama that lasted six months and was about to land in court.

Musk swiftly fired half of Twitter’s workforce and then welcomed former President Donald Trump back onto the platform after running an informal poll. Many advertisers have fled.

And corporate governance is back on the docket after this month’s sudden collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which managed to grow to a $32 billion valuation with no board of directors or finance chief. Top-shelf firms such as Sequoia, BlackRock and Tiger Global saw their investments wiped out overnight.

“We are in the business of taking risk,” Sequoia wrote in a letter to limited partners, informing them that the firm was marking its FTX investment of over $210 million down to zero. “Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside.”

Even with the crypto meltdown, mounting layoffs and the overall market turmoil, it’s not all doom and gloom a year after the market peak.

Golden points to optimism out of Washington, D.C., where President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act will lead to investments in key areas in tech in the coming year.

Funds from those bills start flowing in January. Intel, Micron and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company have already announced expansions in the U.S. Additionally, Golden anticipates growth in health care, clean water and energy, and broadband in 2023.

“All of us are a little optimistic about that,” Golden said, “despite the macro headwinds.”

WATCH: There’s more pain ahead for tech