8 analyses of the moves that matter.
Amazon blocked Meta's Muse shopping agent on a Sunday night. Shopify opened every one of its stores to Muse the next morning. One company is defending a $20 billion-a-quarter ad business built on human attention. The other has nothing to lose by letting the robots in.
The four biggest tech companies plan to spend about $725 billion on AI this year, and even they can't pay for it out of pocket. Amazon is moving chips off its balance sheet, Alphabet is selling stock and Meta is renting its own data centers back from investors. Who can afford the war says more about their moats than the spending does.
In March, Jensen Huang said Nvidia was probably done writing big checks to AI labs. The money never stopped. It changed form, from equity stakes into loan guarantees and financing deals, and now roughly a quarter of Nvidia's business comes from customers it helps pay for.
Anthropic's leaked IPO filing shows the fastest revenue ramp in software history. OpenAI is nearing $70 billion a year. We re-scored both moats against the numbers. Revenue went up. One moat went down.
Nvidia paid $12.9 billion for the place where the world's open AI models live. Open models are Nvidia's broadest customer base and the most likely path around its software lock-in. Jensen Huang decided to own both.
The AI labs cut their prices in the same week. Amazon gave away the software that runs their models, on every cloud. The brains are getting cheap, and Amazon wants to own the body.
From AI race to AI pace. The words changed over a weekend. The spending did not move at all.
Meta is charging Americans for AI for the first time, and running the 2012 playbook to do it. The model is finally frontier-grade. The trust isn't.
