The AI Gold Rush Is Over. The Control War Has Begun.
By Tanvir Newaz
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The interesting question is no longer who is winning AI?
It is:
Who controls the bottlenecks that everyone else depends on?
The first AI boom rewarded companies for demonstrating intelligence. The next phase will reward companies that control compute, capital, data, distribution, energy and access.
OpenAI's reluctance to rush toward public markets becomes part of the story rather than the story itself. Nscale's infrastructure ambitions become another piece. Mecka's robotics-data strategy becomes another.
AI is becoming less about owning intelligence and more about controlling everything intelligence depends on. That's a much bigger story.
