The Global Stock Market Boom, by Country (2011–2025)

How Much Profit Do the World’s Biggest Companies Keep?

The world’s biggest companies generate enormous revenues, but the share that ultimately becomes profit varies widely.

This graphic ranks the world’s 30 largest companies by how much profit they generate for every $100 in revenue, based on Fortune Global 500 data. Profits are after taxes, extraordinary credits or charges, accounting changes, and noncontrolling interests, but before preferred dividends.

Why Tech Keeps More of Every $100

Revenue measures how much money flows through a company, but not how much ultimately reaches the bottom line. Across the world’s largest companies, Big Tech stands apart in how much of that revenue becomes profit.

Profits rounded to the nearest 10 cents.

The gap is striking even among corporate giants. Microsoft generates $36.10 in profit for every $100 in revenue, compared with roughly $3 for Walmart and Costco. Enormous revenue does not necessarily translate into an equally large profit margin.

Much of the difference comes down to business models. Software and digital platforms can serve additional customers at relatively low incremental cost, while retailers, manufacturers, and energy companies must continually pay for inventory, labor, raw materials, logistics, or production.

AI Is Rewriting Big Tech’s Business Model

The margins shown above reflect today’s business models, but AI is making many of those models more capital-intensive. Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. Hyperscaler capital spending is on track to reach $785 billion in 2026 and rise to nearly $1 trillion in 2027.

Nvidia is a major beneficiary of this investment. As a dominant supplier of AI chips, it sits at the center of the infrastructure buildout, while its CUDA software ecosystem can make switching to rival chips more difficult for developers.

On the flipside, the scale of AI investment is raising capital costs across Big Tech. As infrastructure spending climbs, those costs could begin to reshape the margins that currently put many tech companies near the top of this ranking.

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To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the world’s largest companies outside the U.S.

Which Companies Invested the Most Abroad?

In 2025, multinational companies announced more than $1.3 trillion in new foreign investments, up 2.2% from the previous year. The largest commitments spanned semiconductor fabs, data centers, energy projects, and other major infrastructure.

This visualization ranks the 10 largest foreign investors of 2025 using announced investments from The fDi Report 2026. Only greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) announcements are included, meaning mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and intercompany loans are excluded.

Why TSMC Invested $100B in Arizona

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest semiconductor fabricator, topped the ranking after announcing an additional $100 billion investment in its Arizona operations in 2025.

TSMC is also the world’s largest non-U.S. company by market capitalization. Amid record profits and rising demand for its chips, the company planned to use the investment to accelerate production at its facilities in the Phoenix area. The expansion is projected to create more than 18,000 jobs.

The table below ranks the world’s 10 largest foreign investors in 2025 by announced capital expenditure.

TSMC first pledged roughly $12 billion in 2020 to open an Arizona fabrication plant. These facilities, known as “fabs,” were designed to reduce semiconductor supply-chain risk by shifting some production away from Taiwan.

The company steadily expanded its investment over the following years as U.S.-China tensions increased, particularly around advanced chip technology. TSMC plans to produce some of its most advanced chips in Arizona as part of a 2024 deal with the U.S. government.

Despite labor challenges and higher costs, TSMC has continued to deepen its investment in Arizona. Following additional pledges in 2026, the firm’s overall greenfield investment in the state stands at $265 billion, making it the largest foreign investment in U.S. history.

Free-Flowing Tech Capital

TSMC stood well ahead of the field, but tech companies dominated the ranking overall, taking five of the top 10 spots.

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ranked second with $45.1 billion in announced investment. Nearly $40 billion of that total came from plans to build a major data center in Brazil, a project expected to create roughly 5,000 jobs.

Big Tech firms including Alphabet ($25.1 billion) and Microsoft ($17.7 billion) also announced sizable foreign investments. Alphabet subsidiary Google, for example, pledged more than $5 billion for a large data center campus in Belgium to help meet growing demand for Google Cloud.

The Non-Tech Firms Want In Too

Digital infrastructure also shaped the investment priorities of companies outside the tech sector, particularly in Europe.

Emirati state-owned investment firm MGX Fund Management, for example, focuses heavily on global AI technologies. The company announced about $43.4 billion in investment, including a major French data center project aimed at creating one of Europe’s largest campuses of its kind.

Meanwhile, Canadian firm Brookfield Asset Management also targeted Europe’s AI and digital infrastructure market. Brookfield pledged about $28.2 billion in greenfield FDI in 2025, primarily for projects in France and Sweden. Its announced investments are expected to create roughly 4,800 jobs.

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For a breakdown of the sectors driving global FDI, check out The Top 10 Sectors for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on Voronoi.