The beginning was the first step As many things as possible, Elon Musk. Early in 2010, he realized AI had the potential to be the most powerful technological advancement of the century. He was deeply concerned that the humanity could suffer if AI were put under control by powerful forces driven solely by profit. Musk was a very early investor in DeepMind. This UK-based research lab had been at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Musk severed ties to DeepMind after Google acquired the organization in 2014. It was crucial to him that he create a force that is motivated by profit and not human welfare. OpenAI was created by him. When I interviewed Musk and Sam Altman were both adamant at their unveiling, in 2015 that the profit of shareholders wouldn’t be a determining factor.
Now fast-forward. OpenAI has a lot to offer half a trillion Dollars or perhaps $750 billionIts for-profit division has been renamed a Public Benefit Corporation. Musk, who is also the wealthiest person in the entire world, has his own AI for-profit company called xAI. It’s a sad day for the nonprofit laboratories that were supposed to be leading in this field. Even the most panicked Cassandra a decade back probably didn’t think that AI advanced would be controlled and interlocked by one money-seeking, multi-national behemoth.
We have it today. This interconnected complex, funded by foreign powers, is supported by the US Government, who seems to put winning above safety. This complex assemblage of alliances, mergers funding arrangements government initiatives and strategic investments is a rococo of partnership, mergers. The Blob is what I’m calling this entity.
Blob Black Box
To describe all the connections that exist between each of these entities, I’d have to use more than my current word count. Even compiling a streamlined list requires the use of—you guessed it—AI. Let me confess, reader. GPT-5 was my first stop to see the whole picture. “My head is spinning,” This smug, stochastic, parrot asked me to write, swallowing all my pride. I wanted a complete list of cloud agreements, government partnerships, investments and deals. After two minutes, 35 seconds and a normally fast LLM returned with some responses. “You’re not wrong that it’s dizzying,” The bot was ever the sycophant. “It’s basically one giant circular money-and-compute machine.” Attention: This essay does not allow you to create the text that appears on screen. I’ll do all the writing. GPT-5, however, continued to produce several thousand words after it had stopped its punditry. It included flow charts, cross references, and arrows that pointed to the origins of dozens back-scratching situations like the iconic Stargate initiative OpenAI is a consortium of Oracle, Nvidia and Softbank with an Abu Dhabi investment company, all bound by the US government.
The week that just ended provided an even more compelling example: A complex deal between Nvidia and Microsoft. Microsoft’s press release Sums up the whole thing in just three lines. “Anthropic to scale Claude on Azure / Anthropic to adopt NVIDIA architecture / NVIDIA and Microsoft to invest in Anthropic.” It has all the hallmarks of a deal that critics describe as a circular agreement, in which money is transferred between companies without a customer being involved. Microsoft is investing at least $5 billion in Anthropic—a direct rival of Microsoft’s key partner OpenAI—and Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion worth of compute from Microsoft’s cloud. Nvidia also invests in Anthropic which is committed to developing its technology using Nvidia chip. Poof! Nvidia is getting deeper in the businesses of its clients. Microsoft can now rely less on OpenAI. Anthropic has a valuation of $350 Billion. Only two months earlier, Anthropic was valued at $183 Billion.
Anthropic made no comment about the transaction beyond issuing a press statement, and directing journalists to a video where the three CEOs explain the deal. Hyperscale’s bosses take part remotely. These deals are so commonplace that it doesn’t seem worth getting on a flight to make them public. Microsoft’s Satya Nardella is in the middle of the video. His smile looks like that of a Cheshire Cat as he utters what may be Blob’s motto: “We are increasingly going to be customers of each other.” While he is explaining the details, his colleagues give him bobbleheads. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amedei is on the left. Anthropic, which doesn’t own its cloud nor has a non AI related revenue stream like Google or Meta or Microsoft, added Microsoft as a third party to its existing stock-for computing deals with Amazon or Google. Hat trick!
Nvidia Jensen Huang in signature leather jacket calls deal “a dream come true,” He elaborated that he has been watching Anthropic’s deal for some time, and is delighted to be adding the company to his bulging book of deals. “We’re in every enterprise in every single country,” “He says” “Now this partnership of the three of us will be able to bring AI, bring Claude, to every enterprise, to every industry, around the world.”
