Nvidia's Market Value Rivals Germany's GDP. The Middle Powers Carney Champions Are Late

By Daniel Okafor

Nvidia's market capitalization now sits just below Germany's annual GDP and just ahead of Japan's. That single comparison frames the argument in a new Fortune commentary: the nation-state is no longer the primary actor in great-power competition, and the "middle powers" movement championed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rests on a flawed premise.

Carney warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that middle powers must get "at the table" or end up "on the menu." A movement has gathered momentum since, built on the belief that the path through geopolitical uncertainty runs through the middle. The Fortune author, Eswar Prasad, disagrees. In his view, this is not a moment of national dominance. It is the dawn of multi-stakeholder geopolitics—and middle powers are arriving late after the private sector got there first.

The corporate numbers stack up against economies. Apple's market capitalization ranks below Japan but above India. Amazon's sits wedged between Canada and Brazil.

After decades where public policy shaped and constrained private firms, the analysis argues, corporations now set priorities, build bridges, and lead on global challenges. Biotech firms developed and distributed the mRNA vaccines that helped end the COVID-19 pandemic. The world's electronics, consumer products, and innovation sectors run on the output of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Even diplomacy mirrors the shift. On a state visit to the United Kingdom last year, U.S. President Donald Trump offered investment deals in place of trade concessions. When he hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping for a state dinner at the White House in September, he invited a vast coterie of corporate chief executives and finance-industry leaders.

Why does AI expose the middle powers' weakness?

Nowhere is private-sector geopolitical influence more apparent than in AI, the commentary argues. State actors increasingly rely on non-state technology firms for capabilities once held solely by national agencies. SpaceX and Blue Origin lead 21st-century space exploration. Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network has reportedly been deployed across conflict zones from the Sahel to Iran, and provides civilian internet access and battlefield intelligence in Ukraine.

The friction runs deep. Earlier this year, Anthropic clashed with the U.S. administration over how its models could be used by the Department of War. The Trump administration designated Anthropic a supply chain risk to U.S. national security—a first for an American firm.

Anthropic's September threat report identified cases of misuse of its Claude model for malicious activity. The documented instances include:

• A cyber operation targeting a Southeast Asian government agency to extract civilian records
• A China-based threat actor that used Claude to progress work on an undersea weapons system
• Suspected Russia-based threat actors using AI with the intention of building an autonomous kamikaze drone swarm
• A disrupted plot by Iran to use Claude to target U.S. Navy warships in the Middle East

To counter such activity, private AI companies are stepping into roles once held by national intelligence and defense agencies, the analysis states. Private sector actors are now geopolitical actors in their own right.

The data on model development shows how far middle powers sit from the field. Stanford University's 2026 Artificial Intelligence Index report finds AI model development remains highly concentrated within the U.S. and China. Through 2025, the U.S. had 59 "notable" AI models—models meeting notability criteria including citation rate, compute costs, and usage levels—to China's 35. The only other country with multiple notable AI models worldwide was South Korea, with eight.

What did Carney actually propose?

In Davos, Carney spoke of a fading rules-based order—of how the great powers had broken a bargain with their less powerful counterparts. He called on middle powers to withdraw their consent from a global order that no longer serves them and to chart a new path "with impact."

The commentary calls it a tantalizing idea, offered as AI defines how we think, work, fight, and manage risk. Old rules are not just fading but being redrawn entirely. There is no global consensus on how to govern the future's most powerful technology, and the leaders of private firms are stepping into that vacuum of state-led leadership and beginning to set the rules we live by.

The seats at the table are being taken not by middle powers but by private sector actors, the analysis concludes. So long as middle powers are not leading on AI development, attracting AI investment, or dominating parts of the AI supply chain, they will not exert geopolitical leverage in the emerging world. Instead, private sector actors—alongside national leaders in the U.S. and China—will shape the next global system.

The opinions expressed in the original Fortune commentary piece are solely the views of its author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.