Artificial intelligence will change everything flight reservation has beer. Financial analysts estimate This will increase world GDP by around 10% to 20% over the next decade. Just as most companies have become Internet companies in the 1990s and 2000s, almost all companies will be an AI company in a decade.
To deliver calculation power, feed this transformation, companies, countries and capital markets have mobilized resources on an unprecedented scale. When the Chinese IA company Deepseek published its latest open source model to a fraction of the expected training cost, it questioned these investments, inviting a Technological blowlage. However, actions have rebounded. As economists point out, for high -demand products such as AI, technological developments that reduce costs through the efficiency of resources lead to greater overall use. Unsurprisingly, Meta and Microsoft have since doubled their investments in AI.
While cost reductions and open-source models make the development of AI more accessible to startups, support for demand and the Pushing of the AI border will remain expensive. Four large American technological companies in particular – Meta, AlphabetMicrosoft and Amazon – are spend on AI investments. And although the yields to these investments have not yet materialized in their results, the necessary sums in this development race have already rewritten the traditional finance rules.
While the volume of venture capital transactions tends to flat the exhilarating purposes of 2021 and at the beginning of 2022, the rise of the AI caused approximately two significant changes. First of all, it collapsed from other areas of investment, with 62% of all the start -up funding in North America Directed to AI companies In the fourth quarter of 2024. Second, while transactions volumes are down, the agreement The values are increasing.
The amazing costs of the calculation necessary to conduct these AI companies have triggered not only cycles of sky financing, but also solidified the domination of Big Tech – small businesses have pockets deep enough to place these bets. Openai found his boss in MicrosoftAnthropic followed with Amazon. The two avoided standard investment terms. Only one small part Investment of $ 1023 from Microsoft, 2023, went directly to Openai. Instead, most of the money has been allocated in credits for Openai to buy a computer supply from Microsoft’s cloud services.
In the AI era, cloud computing credits have become currency. Access to GPUs and calculation has made AI giants as Nvidia Investors of choice for most startups. Like Elon Musk Tell to investors During a conference in 2023, “GPUs at this stage are much more difficult to obtain than drugs”. AI companies have spent an average of 22% of their expenditure on IT costs During the first three months of 2024 – more than double the amount spent by traditional software companies. Musk himself put on his prodigious fundraising talents to work, closing a $ 6 billion in fundraising To build it The greatest supercuster in the world.
Thanks to strategic financing provisions offering Cloud, Microsoft, Google and Amazon calculation credits have made the mountains of the world of AI depositing on giants of the gilded age of the Internet. These offers offer a multitude of advantages beyond the investment itself. Cloud suppliers bring not only new customers and acquire market share, but they also benefit from high margins on cloud computing services. The evaluations increase in turn.
Although large technological companies can give access to enough calculations to support industry growth, they must also obtain sufficient power to actually execute GPUs, which are massively at high energy intensity. The research fueled by AI requires as much as 10 times More electricity than a standard Google search. And use should increase considerably over the next five years: demand from the data center occupy 8% of total American energy demand by 2030.
At the same time, giants like Google and Amazon have been careful for their energy consumption for years and responded with daring climatic targets Over the past decade. Historically, the vast majority of data centers have been executed on the network, buying power like everyone else. Meanwhile, long -term electricity purchase agreements (APP) were common in the energy industry for decades. They provide an energy buyer with a stable rate and the supplier with a guaranteed request and have been common tools for companies that seek to advance their climatic objectives. It was only in recent years that technology giants have started using similar agreements as a solution to their new energy demand.
In this vein, Microsoft has RELAUNCH The sleeping nuclear power plant of three miles in Pennsylvania, the places of the worst nuclear accident in the United States. Amazon recently bought a data center campus near a nuclear power plant of 960 megawatts for $ 650 million; Power in the center will move out of network via an agreement with the Talen Energy factory operator. Google has signed an agreement to find the energy of a fleet of mini nuclear reactorsWhile Sam Altman of Openai and many other technological magnates invest massively nuclear merger. Energy markets have noted, with the U&P 500 utility index Almost double its growth rate in 2024.
Faced with aggressive antitrust actions, large technological companies have also adopted creative mechanisms towards the consolidation of the industry. Last year, joint ventures and partnerships increased by 40%. While talent becomes an increasingly precious resource, companies have returned to “Acquihires” to develop their research teams while moving away from the antitrust restrictions.
In 2023, Microsoft hired Mustafa SuleymanThe co -founder of the Inflection AI, a company that has collected more than a billion dollars to support its own AI model. With him came hundreds of key employees and $ 650 million license agreement. In 2024, Google obtained a license agreement with CharacterAcquire the company’s chatbot technology at the same time as it has rehired its CEO and other key technologists. Microsoft and Google have had access to critical talents while distributing payments to employees and investors with sophisticated transaction structures.
Although talent -centered acquisitions have been a tool in the landscape of technological finance for years, the intelligent coupling of acquihors with technological license is a new phenomenon. The popularity of these transactions reflects vigorous competition compared to the talents of AI and the transition from the market to consolidation in the Vanguard Frontier models. With the prospect of an artificial general intelligence and a recursive self -learning creating a steering wheel of continuous progress, the most precious asset is not a product or a service – it is the researchers and the engineers who lead the revolution.
American technology giants, who now represent a fifth From the S&P 500, will find new ways to adapt the world of finance to keep the promise of AI. IA productivity promises,, But the AI -obtaining race has already given us a new era of technological financing.
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