Jeff Bezos will reportedly be co-CEO of artificial intelligence startup Project Prometheus, which has already received $6.2 billion in funding. This is the latest in a wave of deals that surpassed $1 billion in the AI sector this year, as Wall Street anticipates global spending will accelerate in the coming years.
timeline
November 17: Jeff Bezos will be co-CEO, along with former Google
November 11: Anthropic announced plans to invest $50 billion in AI infrastructure, starting with data centers in Texas and New York. Anthropic expects this project to generate 800 permanent jobs and more than 2,000 construction jobs.
November 3: OpenAI and Amazon announced a partnership valued at $38 billion, through which OpenAI will use Amazon’s cloud computing services for the next seven years. Amazon will provide the creator of ChatGPT with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to run its AI models.
October 27: The Department of Energy partnered with AMD to develop two artificially intelligent supercomputers in a $1 billion collaboration, according to AMD, which said the systems will drive advances in science, energy and national security.
The first computer, called “Lux,” is expected to come online in the next six months, while the second, “Discovery,” will be completed in 2029.
October 23: Google announced that it will supply up to one million of its AI chips to Anthropic in a deal that both companies say could be worth tens of billions of dollars.
October 16: Oracle executives confirmed a cloud computing deal with Meta worth $20 billion. Oracle will provide Meta with cloud computing capacity for training and deploying AI models.
October 14: Oracle’s cloud division announced that it will deploy tens of thousands of AMD’s new AI chips starting in 2026, with plans to expand the collaboration in 2027 and beyond. However, neither Oracle nor AMD disclosed the financial terms of the deal.
October 13: OpenAI announced a partnership with Broadcom. OpenAI will design and deploy its own AI chips and both companies will jointly build and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators, hardware used to accelerate AI and machine learning tasks. Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the deal.
October 6: OpenAI and AMD have reached a deal that could reportedly give OpenAI a 10% stake in the chipmaker, whose market capitalization has risen to nearly $188 billion. OpenAI announced that it would deploy up to six gigawatts of AMD graphics processing units over several years.
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September 25: Cloud infrastructure company CoreWeave announced that its agreement to provide services to OpenAI has been expanded by up to $6.5 billion, bringing the value of the alliance between OpenAI and CoreWeave to approximately $22.4 billion. This came after CoreWeave announced in March that it would provide OpenAI with AI data centers and cloud technology for five years.
September 22: OpenAI and Nvidia announced a partnership that includes a $100 billion investment by Nvidia in OpenAI. The latter stated that it would use at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for the infrastructure used to train AI models.
September 15: CoreWeave reported in a document filed with the SEC that Nvidia agreed to purchase cloud services worth approximately $6.3 billion through 2032, requiring Nvidia to acquire any excess cloud computing not used by its customers.
September 10: OpenAI has signed a contract with Oracle to purchase $300 billion in computing power over the next five years, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. Oracle will provide approximately 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.
August 22: President Donald Trump announced that Intel agreed to give the United States a 10% stake in the company, valued at about $10 billion, making the federal government the third-largest shareholder in the struggling chipmaker, after Trump demanded the resignation of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
August 10: Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the US government 15% of revenue from chip sales in China in exchange for chipmakers receiving export licenses, shortly after Trump announced a 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, the Financial Times reported.
July 14: Google announced plans to invest $25 billion in data centers and AI infrastructure over the next two years, saying this would help expand “energy capacity, innovation and opportunities in the AI-driven economy.”
May 23: Oracle announced the purchase of $40 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips for OpenAI’s data center in Abilene, Texas. According to the Financial Times, this would be the first Stargate project.
January 21: Trump announced that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle would create a new company, Stargate, in what Trump called the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.” The project contemplates an investment of up to $500 billion to develop AI infrastructure in the United States in the coming years and create 100,000 jobs.
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AI investment weaves a web of circular deals
Most AI companies have been interconnected for years through a series of mutual investments, starting with Microsoft’s $1 billion acquisition of OpenAI in July 2019.
This alliance was consolidated in January 2023, when Microsoft’s investment amounted to approximately $14 billion, making Microsoft the exclusive provider of cloud computing services for OpenAI. Amazon initially invested up to $4 billion in Anthropic in September 2023 and subsequently made another $4 billion investment in November 2024, adding to Google’s commitment to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, announced in October 2023, and another $1 billion earlier this year.
SoftBank was a lead investor in OpenAI’s $40 billion funding round earlier this year, and in August invested $2 billion in Nvidia, which in turn invested $5 billion in Intel and $100 billion in OpenAI, respectively, in two deals the following month. Several economists have warned that the network of investments between AI companies resembles the agreements reached during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and say the flow of financing between companies could be overinflating the market.
CoreWeave’s market capitalization has skyrocketed to almost $67 billion since its IPO in March, as its shares have appreciated 221% in the last six months, while the company has been immersed in multiple alliances. Other market analysts warned that many investments in AI have yet to bear fruit: a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) revealed that 95% of the 300 AI projects analyzed did not generate profits, despite the fact that companies invested a total of 400 billion dollars.
Big number
Annual global spending on AI is expected to reach $375 billion by the end of the year, according to UBS projections. The investment bank estimates that spending on AI will reach $500 billion in 2026, and that spending on energy and resources for electrical demand will exceed $3 trillion annually in 2030. Companies will invest a total of $6.7 trillion in data centers through 2030, and most of this spending will go to financing systems based on AI chips, according to estimates by consulting firm McKinsey.
Read more: Google plans to invest $40 billion in data centers in Texas amid AI boom
Is there an AI bubble?
Economists have warned that a surge in AI investments could destabilize the global market, with some comparing the current business environment to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000.
Bank of America earlier this month released survey results indicating that about 54% of investors believed AI-related assets were in a bubble, suggesting that AI stocks are overvalued by hype and could crash.
Bryan Yeo, chief investment officer at Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, said AI startups were receiving record amounts of funding and argued that any company with the “AI” label would be grossly overvalued. Forbes asked several AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok, about the existence of an AI bubble: Grok and ChatGPT noted its presence, while Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot suggested signs of a budding bubble, and Meta AI and Gemini stated that the existence of a bubble was debatable.
Most chatbots pointed to likely unsustainable enthusiasm on the part of investors, while pointing out that there was nothing wrong with the technology or AI-related products.
This article was originally published in Forbes US
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