Big Tech AI Investment Cheat Sheet
Whilst speculation swirls around OpenAI’s next funding round, with Apple and NVIDIA both rumoured to be participating at a valuation of $100bn 😳, I thought I’d pull together a snapshot of some of big tech’s recent investments in AI companies.
Apple is absent as it’s tended to favour acquiring AI companies over investing in them (e.g. AI Music, DarwinAI, Datakalab, WaveOne) as is Meta, which has been overwhelmingly focussed on internal/open-source development in the AI space.
Notable:
The magnitude of Microsoft’s $13bn investment in OpenAI (it’s not easy to conceptualise how much more a billion is than a million. Here one way: a million seconds is around 11 days, a billion seconds is over 31 years).
Amazon and Google both investing big in Anthropic (maker of ChatGPT-rival Claude) to avoid Microsoft & OpenAI running away with things (Amazon is reportedly now planning to use Claude to power a new and improved Alexa)
Microsoft hedging its huge OpenAI bet slightly with a $650m licensing deal with Inflection AI (maker of personal chatbot Pi).
How small beer the investments are relative to the investing companies’ market valuations (Microsoft’s $13bn investment in OpenAI represents just 0.4% of its market cap).
The recent trend in reverse acquihires/licensing deals instead of traditional investments/acquisitions (Amazon’s just done another with warehouse robotics firm Covariant), although these deals are starting to get more regulatory scrutiny
NVIDIA’s vested interest in lots of boats rising leading to a diffuse investment strategy (more successful AI start-ups = more demand for AI chips).
Competitors shared interest in backing enabling platforms (e.g. Databricks and Hugging Face).
B2B being a good operating model in AI right now (note Databricks’ $43bn market valuation and NVIDIA’s gravity-defying $2.6tn)
Hugging Face’s excellent name and logo 🤗