"AI's leading companies still compete - sorta. They also work together at a large scale in increasingly esoteric ways. You could call that an ecosystem. You could also call it, as AI critics have, a shell game. Either way, the AI business is beginning to function like one giant dollar-eating, energy-sucking entity that makes chips, trains models and sketches utopias to justify its runaway costs. All this is happening well before the takeoff of a "superintelligence" that always seems to lie just over the next ridge."
"What they're saying: "We are in a phase of the build-out where the entire industry's got to come together and everybody's going to do super well," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Wall Street Journal as the AMD deal was unveiled. "You'll see this on chips. You'll see this on data centers. You'll see this lower down the supply chain." Indeed, everyone seems to be singing "Come Together" with Altman and OpenAI."
Leading AI companies both compete and collaborate across a growing industrial ecosystem that produces chips, trains large models, and builds massive data centers. The industry consumes vast capital and energy as firms form interlocking investments and partnerships to scale compute and infrastructure. OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, SoftBank, Microsoft and sovereign funds are financing data-center builds and equipment; Nvidia has new multi-billion-dollar commitments and deals. Competitors such as Anthropic attract Google and Amazon funding. Governments have stepped in with domestic chip subsidies and related policy actions, further entangling public and private investment in AI scale-up.
Read at Axios
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]