Deals, pricing, org moves, and the economics behind them.
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.
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.
