Generative AI ‘FOMO’ is Driving Tech Heavyweights to Invest Billions of Dollars in Startups

Anthropic is the developer behind the AI model Claude, which competes with GPT from Microsoft’s OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini. Along with Meta and Apple they’re all racing to integrate generative AI into their vast portfolios of products and features to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market that’s predicted to top $1 billion in revenue within a decade.

In 2023, investors pumped $29.1 billion combined into nearly 700 generative AI deals, an increase of more than 260% in value from the prior year, according to PitchBook.

A significant chunk of that money was strategic, in that it came from tech companies rather than venture capitalists or other institutions. Fred Havemeyer, head of U.S. AI and software research at Macquarie, said a fear of missing out is one factor driving their decisions.

“They definitely don’t want to miss out on being part of the AI ecosystem,” Havemeyer said. “I definitely think that there’s FOMO in this marketplace.”

The hefty investments are necessary because AI models are notoriously expensive to build and train, requiring thousands of specialized chips that, to date, have largely come from Nvidia. Meta, which is developing its own model called Llama, has said it’s spending billions on Nvidia’s graphics processing units, one of the many companies that’s helped the chipmaker bolster year-over-year revenue by more than 250%.

Whether going the building or investing route, there are a finite number of companies that can afford to play in the market. In addition to developing the chips, Nvidia has emerged as one of Silicon Valley’s top investors, taking stakes in a number of emerging AI companies, partly as a way to make sure its technology gets widely deployed. Similarly, Microsoft, Google and Amazon sometimes offer cloud credits as part of their investments.

In the Amazon-Anthropic deal announced on Wednesday, the two companies said they’ll work closely together in a variety of ways. Anthropic will be using Amazon Web Services for its computing needs as well as Amazon’s chips. Anthropic’s models will be distributed by Amazon to AWS customers.

Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Claude 3, its most powerful model and one that it says lets users upload photos, charts, documents and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers.

Microsoft got into the business of generative AI investing earlier, putting $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. The size of its investment has since swelled to about $13 billion. Microsoft heavily uses OpenAI’s model and offers open source models on its Azure cloud.

Alphabet is playing the part of builder and investor. The company has refocused much of its product development on generative AI, and its newly rebranded Gemini model, adding features into search, documents, maps and elsewhere. Last year, Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup alongside a large cloud contract between the two companies.