Walmart's Nasdaq Move: It Was 53 Years, Not 13

I was watching a video recommended by the YouTube algorithm when I had to pause because of a single number. The video claimed that Walmart had moved its listing to Nasdaq “after 13 years.” Wait, Walmart has only been listed on the New York Stock Exchange for 13 years? That didn’t sound right—my memory suggested it had been much longer. Thinking I might be the only one confused, I opened a search window.

To cut to the chase: it was 53 years, not 13. While it’s just one incorrect number, the interesting point is that this isn’t just an issue with one video. The narrative that “Walmart has transformed into a tech company” is a popular trope in Korean content these days, but what actually happened afterward is rarely covered. So, I’ve re-examined the numbers one by one and added the six months of aftermath the video missed.

The Real Number of Years Walmart Spent Before Moving to Nasdaq

Walmart first listed its name on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1972. Although it went public in 1970, it traded over-the-counter for the first two years before officially joining the NYSE in 1972. In other words, it spent a staggering 53 years on the New York exchange before moving to Nasdaq. Most domestic media outlets correctly reported “53 years,” while some said “54 years,” likely depending on whether they count the IPO year as 1971 or 1972. Either way, it’s a completely different story from “13 years.”

I suspect the number “13” was a typo where the first digit of “53” was dropped, or perhaps an error in an automated script generation process. I have no way to verify it, but given that the rest of the video’s facts were generally accurate, it seems more like a slip-up than an intentional fabrication.

The transfer was announced on November 20, 2025, and trading on Nasdaq actually began on December 9 of that year. At the time of the announcement, Walmart’s market cap was around $800 billion; moving an exchange for a company of this size is said to be the largest in history. While PepsiCo (\~$166 billion) and Linde (~$180 billion) moved to Nasdaq in 2017 and 2023 respectively, they are in a different weight class than Walmart. Furthermore, its inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 index occurred on January 20, 2026, more than a month later. Since switching exchanges and being included in an index are separate events, bundling them under a vague phrase like “early this year” as the video did makes the timeline confusing.

Joining the Trillion-Dollar Club, but What Comes Next?

The most impressive part of the video was the claim that Walmart had joined the $1 trillion market cap club. Indeed, on February 3, 2026, Walmart's stock price hit the $127 level, pushing its market cap past $1 trillion for the first time. It was a first for a traditional offline retailer, and given that the only other U.S.-listed companies to cross $1 trillion at that point were big tech giants like Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, plus Berkshire Hathaway, it was certainly an exceptional event.

However, the video briefly dismisses this by saying, “The stock is currently a bit sluggish due to the AI craze and new listings like SpaceX.” I was curious about how significant this “sluggishness” actually was, so I looked up the recent stock price.

On August 20, 2026, Walmart announced its Q2 earnings. Same-store sales growth in the U.S. was only 2.6%, the lowest in six years. As it missed market expectations, the stock plummeted over 9% in a single day, falling to the $103 range. CFO John David Rainey countered that "the importance of store-to-store sales comparisons is not as significant as it used to be," arguing that online curbside pickup revenue is categorized under e-commerce. That wasn't necessarily wrong, but the market reacted sharply. As of early September, when I'm writing this, Walmart's stock is around the $106 mark, with a market cap of about $842 billion. It has come down significantly from its $1 trillion peak in February.

Wall Street’s reaction immediately after hitting $1 trillion wasn't exactly celebratory either. Analysts noted that the stock was pushed up by [index fund](/en/posts/passive-investing-market-structure-paradox/) inflows following the Nasdaq-100 inclusion, and warnings of overvaluation emerged, citing that the "stock price rose too steeply relative to earnings." At the time, Walmart's P/E ratio exceeded 38x, a very high level for a traditional retailer. One media outlet noted that "in the $1 trillion club, even small mistakes can lead to a sharp decline," using Costco’s previous struggle with earnings as a cautionary tale—and within six months, Walmart became that very example.

Coincidentally, the company’s leadership also changed during this period. Doug McMillon, who led Walmart for nearly 12 years, stepped down on February 1, 2026, and was succeeded by John Furner, who joined the company as a part-time store clerk in 1993 and stayed for over 30 years. The Nasdaq move, Nasdaq-100 inclusion, $1 trillion milestone, and CEO change all happened around the same time, yet the video fails to mention the leadership transition at all. Perhaps the video was filmed before the news broke, or they simply deemed it off-topic.

Why Did ‘Code Puppy’ Get a Leash?

Among the various AI tools introduced in the video, the most notable was ‘Code Puppy.’ It’s an internal AI tool that writes program code when an employee describes what they need. The video claims, “Over 2 million employees are using this program to work efficiently.” The number itself wasn’t far off; Walmart has about 2.1 million total employees, and the tool was indeed distributed to all levels without restrictions.

But that’s where the video stops. I was curious about the next chapter of this success story, and digging into why the unlimited distribution didn’t last reveals some interesting structural problems.

Unlike search engines or general apps, AI tools incur real costs for every single request. A request to create a slide or polish an email tone is structured to be billed by the token. Furthermore, as the usage of this tool became a sort of performance metric within the company, some employees began using it more than necessary. Eventually, in June 2026, Walmart changed Code Puppy access from unlimited to a per-employee token quota. A company that prides itself on sophisticated systems like demand forecasting and ad bidding ended up having to hit the brakes because internal AI usage far exceeded expectations. Walmart CTO Suresh Kumar explained this as “a measure to reduce the waste of multiple employees asking the same questions,” but flipping it around, it seems things moved in a slightly different direction than the initial picture of “everyone using AI freely to achieve efficiency.”

Coincidentally, there was also news that the developer who created this tool recently left the company for an AI startup. It leaves a complicated aftertaste for a project frequently cited as a success story.

It made me wonder: isn’t using AI for problems with a ‘correct answer’—like inventory forecasting or logistics routing—a completely different challenge from using it for tasks where there is no standard for ‘how much is enough’—like writing slides or polishing emails? The former allows for relatively clear cost-benefit calculations, while the latter is prone to starting on the optimism of “if we just give them access, they’ll become efficient on their own,” only to end up rewriting the rules after the bill arrives. The fact that even a company of Walmart’s scale couldn’t avoid this trial and error is actually quite interesting.

There is also another side to this AI transition story that the video doesn’t cover. In May 2025, Walmart laid off about 1,500 corporate employees, specifically in the global technology organization, e-commerce logistics, and the Walmart Connect advertising division—ironically the very unit cited as a success story in the video. In May 2026, they reduced or reassigned about 1,000 office jobs during the integration of technology and product organizations. Around the same time, Target laid off up to 1,800 people (8% of its headquarters staff) and Kroger cut about 1,000. The industry is interpreting this as a signal that AI-driven labor replacement is beginning across the retail sector. It’s too early to conclude that AI has completely replaced humans, but it’s certainly a more complex picture than “AI adoption = a happy ending where everyone works more efficiently.”

Walmart Connect: How Big is the Ad Business?

The video introduces Walmart Connect as “a new service that earns massive money from ads rather than just selling products.” The direction is correct. However, I was curious about the scale of this “massive” revenue, so I looked up the actual figures.

Walmart’s global advertising revenue for fiscal year 2026 (February 2025–January 2026) was approximately $6.4 billion, a 46% increase from the previous year. Compared to when the service launched in 2021, it has grown nearly threefold in five years, so the growth itself is impressive. However, when compared to Walmart's total revenue of $713.2 billion, the share of advertising is less than 1%. In contrast, Amazon’s advertising revenue is around $68 billion, which is known to account for about 8% of its gross merchandise volume. Walmart’s own CFO has admitted that “the ratio of ad revenue to GMV is still in the low to mid-range.” So, while the direction is right, it’s closer to “just starting to pick up speed in that direction” rather than “Walmart is sitting on a gold mine of ad revenue.”

I also fact-checked the claim about the second-price auction (where you pay one penny more than the second-highest bid). The video’s explanation was mostly correct. However, it was a system implemented in June 2022, which is older than suggested, and in reality, it’s a more sophisticated method that reflects not just the bid price but also relevance to the search term. This means highly relevant products can pay even less than the second-highest bid—it’s a more complex rule than just “second price + 1 cent.”

The story about Luminate is also on the right track. The concept of selling analysis reports based on in-store and online data to partners is a strategy now considered an industry standard, used by other major retailers like Amazon and Kroger. However, since Walmart doesn’t separately disclose the exact revenue scale for this, it’s hard to verify how much the expression “a platform generating billions of dollars in revenue” overlaps with the ad revenue ($6.4 billion). It seems honest to reserve judgment on this.

As an aside, I thought about Warren Buffett while writing this. It’s known that Berkshire Hathaway steadily sold off its Walmart shares starting around 2015 and had disposed of almost all of them by 2018. That was likely a judgment not much different from the market’s dominant view at the time that Walmart would shrink under pressure from Amazon’s growth. Ironically, the second non-tech company to be named when Walmart hit a $1 trillion market cap was none other than Berkshire Hathaway. It’s a strange irony, considering what happened in the spot Buffett walked away from.

Where Did the Name ‘Walmart Depot’ Come From?

It’s also worth noting the ‘Walmart Depot’ mentioned later in the video. The claim is that they convert closed pharmacy locations into logistics hubs to realize 30-minute delivery. After looking into it, the name the company officially uses more often is ‘Spark Delivery Depot.’ While it’s not an entirely wrong name, as Walmart has used the term ‘Walmart Depot’ itself, there is a different term that is more commonly used in the industry.

Looking at the scale, it’s still closer to a pilot stage. The first pilot location was in Dallas, and it subsequently opened in a former Walgreens location in Fayetteville, Arkansas. They plan to open additional ones in areas like Poughkeepsie, New York, and Carlstadt, New Jersey, so it’s still limited to a few cities. The facility size is about 20,000 square feet on average, much smaller than a typical Walmart Supercenter, and it’s a logistics-only space where regular customers cannot enter. A $10 surcharge applies to 30-minute deliveries. The strategy of layering these small logistics hubs on top of their 4,700-store network to reduce delivery times is exactly as the video described, but the phrase “now you can get it within 30 minutes” felt slightly exaggerated, as if it were possible everywhere in the country.

‘GoLocal,’ briefly mentioned in the video, has a similar vibe. It’s a service that utilizes Walmart’s 13,000-person delivery workforce to handle deliveries for other small business owners. Again, the direction is factual, but since this is an area that competes head-on with existing last-mile networks like Amazon Flex or DoorDash, it’s hard to see it as a unique competitive advantage exclusive to Walmart. In the end, most of the new businesses I checked were less about “a completely new story” and closer to “Walmart jumping on a trend the industry is already moving toward by leveraging its own assets (store networks, logistics personnel).”

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The search that started from one video took longer than expected. At first, I just wanted to verify one number, but as I dug deeper, I realized that the story “Walmart has become a tech company” looks quite different depending on the snapshot in time you choose. The $1 trillion market cap in February was clearly a real event, and it is true that 2 million people accessed Code Puppy. However, time has continued to flow since that scene; the company changed its CEO, experienced an earnings shock, and put the brakes on its AI tool. Whether this is a “successful transition to a tech company” or a “transition currently in progress with an uncertain destination” is hard to say for sure at this point. Perhaps things will become a bit clearer around the next earnings announcement (November 19).