Who Wins the Spoils With AI

Have you noticed how the tech giants are investing trillions they don’t really have, in the pursuit of staying relevant?

They became big in the past two decades by scaling platforms. This time, they are scaling investments to build platforms they hope will scale.

It’s a flip that many did not see coming. The pace however is vertical.

Amazon committed up to $25B more into Anthropic. Anthropic committed $100B+ to AWS over the next decade. Google unveiled its next-gen TPUs. SpaceX acquired xAI for $250B. Across February and March, another $100B+ in acquisitions from OpenAI, Alphabet, Palo Alto, IBM.

So where is the value going to land?

In the PC boom, Intel and Microsoft cornered the profit. In the internet era, it was the platform scalers. In the AI boom, hardware has the head start — NVIDIA at the cusp of the first $5 trillion valuation, Dell’s AI server backlog pulling a $45 price-target upgrade in a single analyst note.

But is this an early demand-supply honeymoon? When supply ramps and competition sharpens, does it become a race to the bottom?

Software tells a different story. Capex for the top firms is up 5X. Balance sheets are starting to look like utility companies — long-term energy contracts, 10-year partnership lock-ins with competition.

Or is it now com-partner-tition?

If the long-term value does not sit with software or hardware — where is it?

The users take all the spoils

PwC’s 2026 AI Performance study landed this month: three-quarters of AI’s economic gains are being captured by just 20% of companies — with the leaders focused on growth, not just productivity. The gap is widening.

And tech firms are moving first. Snap cut a quarter of planned headcount — Evan Spiegel named the cause: AI now writes 65%+ of Snap’s code. Meta is reportedly building an AI clone of Zuckerberg to represent him at scale.

Tech isn’t piloting. Tech is moving.

FMCG? We’re busy. Busy with supply, commodity, demand. AI? Let’s do the pilots and see. That’s the trap. The urgent is crowding out the structural.

The question — what you should ask yourself this Friday: What will I change this quarter because of everything that happened last quarter? Or can I wait one more quarter till things ‘settle down’?

Things ‘won’t settle down’. Don’t wait for a quarter. Act now! The spoils aren’t waiting for the 20% of companies. They’re waiting for the 20% of leaders inside every company who move first. I’ve seen this up close — the leaders who moved in 2025 are now running circles around peers who waited. Leadership velocity is now the only real moat left. Everything else is noise.