Who’s really making money from the AI boom? Follow the cash behind OpenAI, Nvidia & Big Tech
The AI boom has led to an unprecedented wave of spending, with tech companies pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, data centers, chips and startups. But amidst this investment frenzy, an important question remains: Where is all this money really going?
OpenAI led the AI boom
Today’s AI spending wave can be traced back to OpenAI’s ChatGPT moment.
It launched ChatGPT in November 2022 (though the foundation was laid years ago). 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: the future was artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have announced major AI infrastructure plans and begun spending billions of dollars on AI data centers and chips.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s success has led to the creation of several similar AI labs, and investors have poured money into them to avoid missing out on the AI boom.
The investment wave has only gained momentum. According to business and technology research company Gartner, worldwide artificial intelligence spending is expected to reach $2.52 trillion in 2026, an increase of 44% compared to the previous year.
So who actually makes money?
For all the optimism, if you take the term artificial intelligence out of the equation, this all looks a bit ridiculous. According to researcher and AI critic Ed Zitron, more than $16 billion has been invested in startups by the end of 2023, in addition to over $150 billion in capital expenditures, just because a single website is so popular.
So who actually made the money; startups? No, the companies own the infrastructure.
AI startups pay OpenAI or Anthropic for AI services. These companies pay Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle or CoreWeave for cloud computing. These 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 is not one company, it’s the cycle; it’s how money moves around the AI industry,” Viram Shah, Founder and CEO of Vested Finance, told LiveMint. “OpenAI alone has roughly $1.4 trillion in commitments, compared to roughly $13 billion in revenue today. This gap makes people nervous, and honestly, it’s fair to be nervous about it.”
How will OpenAI’s collapse affect AI startups?
If the AI boom collapses, Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon will certainly feel the impact, given their massive investments in AI labs. They may face slower earnings growth and weak investor sentiment, but the damage will likely stop there. At the end of the day, their business doesn’t entirely depend on it.
“But if the demand for AI declines, it is the players who finance themselves through the loop who bear the real solvency risk,” Shah notes.
For example, if OpenAI fails and cannot pay infrastructure providers like CoreWeave, Oracle, or Cerebras, they will be in a difficult situation as they will have borrowed heavily to build AI data centers.
OpenAI’s collapse would also severely damage trust in the AI industry.
In such a scenario, OpenAI could eventually be absorbed by Microsoft (free versions of ChatGPT disappear and AI services become expensive), but other AI startups, including companies like Perplexity, Harvey, Cognition, Glean, and Sierra, will find it much harder to convince investors that they can succeed where OpenAI failed.
