San Francisco, Oct 18 (IANS): Tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google-parent Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia and others added $2.4 trillion to their market capitalisations in a year marked by the buzz surrounding generative artificial intelligence (AI), a new report has shown.

According to the venture capital firm Accel, the share price values of these big technology firms grew by an average of 36 per cent (year-over-year).

For the first time, Nvidia entered the trillion-dollar club, with the US chip-maker now valued at more than $1 trillion. Nvidia's high-performance CPUs enable many advanced generative AI models, which generate new content from huge amounts of training data.

The report also mentioned that cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) firms, such as Salesforce, Palantir and Unity, rose by 29 per cent in the year to date.

Last year, the outlook for cloud and SaaS was down.

According to the report, companies' values were reduced by $1.6 trillion as investors exited high-growth tech stocks.

Moreover, the report showed that the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite returned to 80 per cent of its all-time high within 18 months. It took the Nasdaq about 14 years to reach that milestone.

Funding for cloud and SaaS firms has also returned to pre-Covid levels in Europe, Israel, and the US.

Further, the report stated that the number of unicorn companies has returned to pre-Covid levels, with AI accounting for a substantially larger proportion of new billion-dollar companies.

In Europe and Israel, 40 per cent of new unicorns were in generative AI, whereas 80 per cent were in the US.