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Who’s really profiting from all the money pouring into AI?

7/31/24 1:50PM

This earnings season is revealing new details of big tech’s eye-popping spending on all things AI, and it shows no signs of slowing. But who is profiting from all this investment, and will it ever lead to profitable AI businesses?

Nvidia seems to be continuing to make a killing selling its AI computing hardware to all of the companies in the space. Unless there is a huge shift away from training ever larger AI models, its products are likely to be in demand.

Microsoft is making money selling OpenAI’s technology to customers via Azure, and they are planning long-term to meet demand. On Microsoft’s Q4 earnings call this week, executives said demand for AI computing from Azure boosted revenue, and signaled that large investments in data centers, and expensive GPUs will continue, laying out a 15 year timeline to build capacity, allowing them flexibility to respond to demand for AI services.

New reporting from The Information reveals that Microsoft is on track to make about $1 billion annually reselling OpenAI’s services (as part of their complicated partnership), but currently a quarter of that revenue is coming from one customer — TikTok, which could turn elsewhere for its AI computing.

Microsoft’s deal gives them access to OpenAI’s technology, and is rumored to include a hefty slice of their OpenAI profits until their investment is recouped.

Speaking of OpenAI, the company makes money selling Plus, Team, and Enterprise tiers of ChatGPT subscriptions, and by charging developers access to its API, which is estimated to generate several billion dollars per year. But OpenAI’s business depends upon expensive hardware, high energy costs and has to bankroll some of the highest paid roles in tech.

OpenAI has been busy spending Microsoft’s $10 billion investment on a quest to build artificial general intelligence, which may not be a thing that will ever actually exist. But industry observers are starting to question the fundamentals of OpenAI’s business and can’t figure out how it will continue to raise the cash it needs to power its research and development. Not to mention its ChatGPT service, which is incredibly expensive to operate.

OpenAI’s technology will be showing up on Apple iPhones this year as part of iOS18, but Apple isn’t paying them for the deal, raising more questions about how OpenAI will fund those increased costs.

Meta has been spending massively on AI research and hoarding expensive chips, with plans to spend between $35 billion and $40 billion on capital expenditures in 2024. But its AI spending hasn’t yielded much in the way of revenues yet, other than AI improvements to its advertising business.

Earnings reports from Meta later today and Amazon tomorrow may tell more of the story. Last quarter, AI was a key driver of big tech’s capex spending spree:

Rani Molla

Tunnel Vision

9/12/25

Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

Jon Keegan

9/11/25

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

9/11/25

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal