Recently, the Fortune Global 500 list was officially released, bringing a new round of reshuffling to the global business landscape.
Overall, the Fortune Global 500 companies generated total revenues of $41.7 trillion, accounting for more than one-third of global GDP, and employed approximately 70.1 million people worldwide.
Over the past year, these companies generated a total of $2.98 trillion in profits, of which $1 trillion came from financial firms.
2025 Fortune Global 100 List
Highlights of the Fortune Global 500 List
Walmart: The Tech Play of a Retail Giant
Walmart has topped the list for 12 consecutive years, with total annual revenue of $680.9 billion, up 5.1% year-over-year. Groceries account for about 60% of revenue, while the company also covers categories like general merchandise, electronics, health, and pharmaceuticals.
Source: Fortune
Walmart's e-commerce penetration has reached 18%, implying a scale of about $122 billion, with multiple quarters of over 15% high growth. In FY2025, capital expenditures hit $23.8 billion, heavily focused on AI, automated warehousing, and digital retail, as Walmart is increasingly seen as a "stealth tech giant."
Tech Legion: FAANG Companies Deliver Strong Performance
Tech giants continue to dominate the list, with FAANG showing robust performance.
Amazon ranks 2nd with $637.9 billion in revenue, of which AWS accounts for about 16–17%. The company plans over $100 billion in capital expenditures for 2025, primarily betting on AI infrastructure and cloud expansion.
Apple at 8th, Alphabet at 13th, Microsoft at 22nd, and Meta at 41st all remain firmly in the top 50.
Netflix, with a 15.7% year-over-year revenue increase, ranks 398th.
Nvidia: The Most Dazzling "Dark Horse"
As a company driven by AI and GPU technology, Nvidia became the biggest dark horse on the 2025 Fortune 500 list. Its revenue reached $130.5 billion, an astonishing 114% year-over-year growth, jumping to 66th on the list.
Nvidia's market cap neared $4 trillion at one point in 2025, making it one of the world's most valuable tech companies and setting a new historic high for the semiconductor industry.
Nvidia's rise is not just a single company's success story; it signals that the AI infrastructure sector has become the most dazzling new growth engine on the Fortune 500 list. In contrast to the steady growth of traditional internet giants, Nvidia represents an unprecedented capital and industrial focus on the "computing power dividend."
New Career Directions Under the AI Revolution
AI is not only reshaping corporate capital spending but also rewriting the job market. According to CompTIA, there were 476,000 tech job openings in the U.S. in 2025, nearly 40,000 of which involved AI.
Source: CompTIA
The compensation for emerging roles is striking:
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AI Prompt Engineer: Often requires interdisciplinary skills (e.g., NLP optimization), with compensation typically exceeding $300,000 at top companies
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Machine Learning Engineer: Median total compensation around $250,000, demanding proficiency in TensorFlow/PyTorch
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AI Ethics Specialist: With additional background in philosophy or law, salaries often above $180,000
Source: Zip Recruiter
For example, Tesla's speech recognition engineers start with a total package around $240,000; Snowflake's AI infrastructure engineers start around $230,000; and Optiver's quantitative machine learning engineers commonly see total packages in the $300,000–$460,000 range.
Source: Levels.fyi
Real Challenges in the Job Market
Fortune 500 companies also have their preferred elite school graduates.
Stanford, MIT, and CMU are the most sought-after talent incubators for Silicon Valley and global tech giants; in Europe, ETH Zurich has produced a large number of top talents in quantum, materials, and algorithms.
Wall Street's traditional target schools include Harvard, Wharton, and NYU Stern; the City of London long relies on talent from the LSE Economics Department and Oxford's PPE program.
UT Austin's petroleum engineering program has ranked first in the U.S. for years; Germany's RWTH Aachen University, known as the "cradle of engineers," is a talent source for European manufacturing giants.
However, even prestigious school backgrounds and the luster of big-name companies cannot completely shield against macroeconomic headwinds.
According to The New York Times, New York City added only 956 private-sector jobs in the first half of 2025, the slowest non-recession pace since 2003. Finance, retail, and hospitality all cut hiring, and AI substitution effects are beginning to hit financial positions.
Source: NY Times
The current employment environment is extremely complex, with industry demands constantly reshuffling. No industry is forever lucrative, and no major is eternally in demand.
Therefore, as a student or job seeker, you need to:
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Assess the situation: Monitor macro trends and technological inflection points to seize development opportunities without blindly chasing the hottest trends.
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Know yourself: Discover your interests and abilities, find your personal positioning, and be clear about your strengths.
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Balance passion and returns: Don't abandon your passion for short-term high pay, nor overlook career stability for the sake of interest.
We hope everyone can find the optimal balance between what they love and what they earn, and carve out their own academic and career path.
