Who's really making money from the AI boom? Follow the cash behind OpenAI, Nvidia & Big Tech
AI Summary
The AI investment surge, driven by the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, has led to over $150 billion in capital spending and a projected $2.52 trillion in global AI spending by 2026. However, concerns arise about the sustainability of this boom, as the financial benefits primarily flow to infrastructure providers rather than startups, and a potential collapse of key players like OpenAI could jeopardize the entire ecosystem. Investors should monitor the circulation of funds within the AI industry and the solvency risks associated with startups reliant on major cloud providers.
The AI boom has unleashed an unprecedented wave of spending, with technology companies committing hundreds of billions of dollars to AI infrastructure, data centres, chips, and startups. But amid this investment frenzy, one key question remains: where is all the money actually going?
Today's AI spending wave can be traced back to OpenAI's ChatGPT moment.
It launched ChatGPT in November 2022 (though its groundwork was laid years earlier). At the time, the tech industry was facing slowing growth, and ChatGPT changed that almost overnight, giving Big Tech a compelling new story for investors: artificial intelligence was the future. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta all announced huge AI infrastructure plans and began spending billions of dollars on AI data centers and chips.
Meanwhile, OpenAI's success led to the launch of several similar AI labs, and investors poured money into them to avoid missing the AI boom.
The investment wave has only gathered momentum. According to business and technology research firm Gartner, worldwide spending on AI is projected to reach $2.52 trillion in 2026, up 44% from the previous year.
Despite all the optimism, if you remove the term AI from the equation, this all seems a little ludicrous. More than $16 billion was invested in startups, on top of over $150 billion in capital spending by the end of 2023, just because a single website had been very popular, as per Ed Zitron, reasearcher and AI critic
And who made the money, really – the startups? No, it's the companies that own the infrastructure.
AI startups pay OpenAI or Anthropic for AI services. Those companies pay Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, or CoreWeave for cloud computing. Those cloud providers then buy chips from Nvidia and Broadcom, which in turn rely on manufacturers like TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron.
“The real thing to watch isn't any single company, it's the loop – how money keeps circulating within the AI industry,” says Viram Shah, Founder and CEO, Vested Finance, while speaking to LiveMint, and adds, “OpenAI alone has commitments of roughly $1.4 trillion against today's revenue of roughly $13 billion. That gap is what makes people nervous, and honestly, it's fair to be nervous about it.”
If the AI boom were to collapse, Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon would certainly feel the impact, given their massive investments in AI labs. They could face slower earnings growth and weaker investor sentiment, but the damage would likely stop there. At the end of the day, their businesses do not depend entirely on it.
“But if the AI demand dents, it's the players funding themselves through the loop who carry the actual solvency risk,” notes Shah.
For example, if OpenAI fails and is unable to pay infrastructure providers such as CoreWeave, Oracle, or Cerebras, they will be in a lurch, having borrowed heavily to build AI data centres.
The collapse of OpenAI would also severely damage confidence across the AI industry.
In such a scenario, OpenAI could eventually be absorbed by Microsoft (with free versions of ChatGPT disappearing, and AI services becoming expensive), but other AI startups—including companies such as Perplexity, Harvey, Cognition, Glean, and Sierra—would find it much harder to convince investors they could succeed where OpenAI could not.
Sanchari Ghosh is an Assistant Editor at Mint with over 12 years of experience in journalism, specialising in personal finance, DLT & DeFi, geopolitics and foreign policy, with a particular emphasis on how these areas intersect. <br> She writes extensively about how money works in everyday life—helping readers navigate personal finance decisions. <br> As AI reshapes investing behaviour, capital is increasingly flowing into decentralized ecosystems, redefining how assets are managed, traded, and valued. She focuses on explaining how money flows within frameworks like Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), DeFi protocols, and crypto markets—while also ...
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