Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Observer’s 2026 A.I. Power Index: Who Controls the Capital Flow in A.I

Power in artificial intelligence no longer moves through the channels everyone learned to watch.

Power in artificial intelligence has stopped moving through the channels everyone was trained to watch. There was a time (not long ago, though it already feels quaint) when you could rank the field by compute and capital raised, and the ranking would roughly match reality. That scoreboard no longer explains who wins.

There are other A.I. Power Lists, but ours asks one question and holds to it: Who, over the last twelve months, has controlled the flow of capital in artificial intelligence? The money, where it moves, who moves it and who is waiting.

The honorees below make decisions that everyone (downstream and up) follows, but the mechanisms of power in A.I. shift faster than in any other sector that history has ever chronicled, so whether their leverage compounds is a question we look forward to asking next year.

The Most Powerful People in A.I.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Stephen A. Schwarzman

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan

Eric Glyman & Karim Atiyeh

Misha Laskin & Ioannis Antonoglou

Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez & Nick Frosst

Bret Taylor & Clay Bavor

Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond & Thom Wolf

Cristóbal Valenzuela

Guillaume Lample, Timothée Lacroix & Arthur Mensch

Piotr Dąbkowski & Mati Staniszewski

Minna Song & Stoyan (Tony) Stoyanov

Founder of xAI; CEO of Tesla & SpaceX

Elon Musk became the A.I. industry’s largest disruptor and financier this year after rolling his LLM, social media and space businesses into a $1.75 trillion juggernaut debuting on Nasdaq. In February, Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI, which had absorbed the social media platform X the previous year, in a deal that valued SpaceX at about $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. The series of deals fused rocket and satellite production, internet services, A.I. research, data centers and social media into one vertically integrated tech giant. It also formalized Musk’s lifelong ambition to build an all-encompassing business empire under the “X” brand.Musk’s long-term goal is to move the energy-intensive process of running A.I. systems off-planet. In SpaceX’s IPO filings, he pitched the idea of space-based data centers using satellites and solar power, which would be vastly cheaper than land-based infrastructure. SpaceX has filed for permission to put as many as one million satellites in Earth’s orbit. Musk estimates the technology could be cost-competitive in two to three years.In March, Musk unveiled Terafab, a massive semiconductor initiative designed to give Tesla, SpaceX and xAI direct control over the chips powering their A.I. systems. The project's ultimate goal is to generate one terawatt of annual compute capacity. The initial phase is estimated to cost $55 billion, with total investments projected to reach $119 billion. Musk’s team has already begun reaching out to supply partners with the goal of beginning silicon production by 2029.Terafab plans to use Intel’s next-generation 14A process for eventual mass production in Grimes County, Texas. In April, Tesla broke ground on an initial $3 billion R&D pilot facility at Tesla’s Giga Texas in Austin. This research fab will test and prototype chips for Tesla's cars and Optimus robots at a limited scale.

CEO of Google & Alphabet Inc.

Sundar Pichai spent the past year proving that Google can keep pace in A.I. without compromising the business it already has. Alphabet’s share price doubled over the past 12 months, while most of its Big Tech peers moved far less, and the company has backed that confidence with heavy spending. After investing about $91 billion in 2025, it lifted its projected 2026 capital expenditure to between $180 billion and $190 billion. Alphabet has already crossed the $100 billion quarterly revenue mark, and Google Cloud has continued to post strong growth. Gemini has also reached a wide audience, surpassing more than 900 million monthly active users, and “AI Mode” in Search has passed 1 billion monthly users, Pichai said at Google I/O in May.Pichai has argued that A.I. is becoming central to how Google works and how people search, write and code. At Cloud Next in April, he highlighted Google’s internal use of A.I., saying 75 percent of new code at the company is now A.I.-generated and then reviewed by engineers, up from 50 percent the previous fall. He also unveiled Google’s eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units, built for heavy training workloads.That same month, Google introduced Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, aimed at helping companies manage fleets of A.I. agents rather than just experiment with them. Pichai’s broader message is that Google wants to control the full stack, from A.I. chips to Search and Android, while keeping users inside its own ecosystem. That makes this a much bigger bet than a simple Gemini-versus-ChatGPT contest.

Co-Founder & CEO, Anthropic

Anthropic, currently the world's most valuable private A.I. startup valued at $965 billion, is poised for a trillion-dollar public market debut. It's a remarkable ascent for a company that was seen as a cautious alternative to OpenAI just a few years ago. In May, Amodei said Anthropic had posted an 80-fold annual increase in revenue and usage in the first quarter of 2026, pushing projected annualized revenue past $47 billion.That growth has come alongside sharper political and regulatory scrutiny. After Anthropic temporarily suspended access to Claude Fable 5 in June, Amodei argued in an essay that governments should be able to block or delay deployment of models judged, on the basis of third-party assessment, to pose unacceptable risks. He followed that by announcing $200 million for research into public policy on A.I. and another $150 million for a national fellowship aimed at spreading the benefits of A.I. more broadly across the U.S.Meanwhile, the company’s appetite for compute continues to grow. In April, Amodei secured 5 gigawatts of next-generation compute capacity with Google and Broadcom, beginning in 2027, to support future frontier models. Anthropic has also committed more than $100 billion over ten years to Amazon cloud infrastructure in exchange for up to 5 gigawatts of additional capacity, while Amazon has said it will invest as much as $25 billion in the company.In addition, Anthropic has announced a $50 billion data center buildout in Texas and New York. It has also pledged $30 billion toward Microsoft Azure compute and agreed to buy up to 1 gigawatt of Nvidia hardware.

Founder, Chairman & CEO of Meta

Mark Zuckerberg overhauled Meta’s A.I. team last year after deciding that simply playing catch-up was no longer enough. In June 2025, Zuckerberg launched Meta Superintelligence Labs to pursue advanced machine intelligence and tapped Alexandr Wang, the Scale AI co-founder and former chief executive, to lead the effort after Meta took a $14.3 billion 49 percent stake in his company. Since then, MSL has absorbed Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team in an effort to unify frontier-model development with product deployment.Zuckerberg has said he would rather risk “misspending a couple of hundred billion” than fall behind in A.I. That urgency has carried into 2026, with Meta raising its capital spending forecast to as much as $145 billion, after spending $72.2 billion in 2025. This week, the company announced plans to begin producing its custom Iris A.I. chip in September in an effort to double computing capacity. For now, Meta’s ad business is still strong enough to bankroll the ambition. The company generated $201 billion in revenue last year and is on pace to reach roughly $250 billion this year, according to Wall Street estimates. In the first quarter of 2026, Meta generated $56.3 billion in revenue—a 33 percent year-over-year increase—and $26.8 billion in net income.Over the past year, Meta’s major A.I. releases have included April’s Muse Spark, the first major model out of MSL, the new Meta Glasses in June and Muse Image in July. Zuckerberg has cast the effort as a bid to build “personal superintelligence,” and he has said Meta will keep shipping products throughout the year rather than wait for a single breakthrough. With apps that already reach billions of users, Meta has a distribution advantage that rivals still have to buy.He has also been candid about the growing pains. In May, Meta notified roughly 8,000 employees of layoffs and reassigned about 7,000 others to A.I.-focused roles as part of a broader reorganization. Zuckerberg has acknowledged how hard the transition has been, telling employees in July that A.I. agent development had not accelerated as quickly as expected. In July, Meta also expanded its Hyperion data center in Louisiana to five gigawatts of planned computing capacity, increasing the project’s expected investment to more than $50 billion.

Founder & CEO of OpenAI

On February 27, Sam Altman closed a $110 billion funding round for OpenAI at a $730 million pre-money valuation. On March 31, OpenAI closed the expanded round with $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation, in what was likely the largest private technology financing to date. The funding included  $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $30 billion from SoftBank, with Microsoft and additional financial investors contributing to the expanded round. The financing reshaped OpenAI’s partnerships. Amazon Web Services became the exclusive third-party cloud provider for the company’s enterprise platform, Frontier. This prompted Microsoft and OpenAI to renegotiate their longstanding partnership. In April, the two companies amended their agreement, easing exclusivity terms to allow OpenAI to operate across multiple clouds while keeping Azure as the primary platform. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, surpassed 900 million weekly users and 50 million paying subscribers as of February of this year.Growth came at a price. OpenAI burned $3.7 billion in Q1 2026 alone against $5.7 billion in revenue. At the company's "Intelligence at Work" event on June 2, Altman acknowledged that enterprise customers have become increasingly weary of costs after spending much of the year chasing model capability. Days after the Capitol Hill appearance came a rupture with OpenAI's most important distribution partner. On July 10, Apple sued OpenAI in federal court in Northern California, alleging trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract in the development of OpenAI's unreleased consumer hardware. The complaint names hardware chief Tang Tan, a former Apple vice president, and engineer Chang Liu as defendants alongside io, the Jony Ive venture OpenAI acquired for $6.5 billion, and claims the misconduct ran "at every level" of the company. Apple, which says more than 400 of its former employees now work at OpenAI, is seeking damages and an injunction barring OpenAI from using its trade secrets. "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets," an OpenAI spokesperson said. The suit further strains, but has not formally ended, the 2024 partnership that put ChatGPT inside the iPhone, and lands squarely on the two bets Altman has staked the next phase on: the hardware device expected this year and the IPO the company continues to weigh.

Founder & CEO of Nvidia

Last year, Nvidia's data center revenue grew more than 140 percent from the previous year to $115 billion, accounting for the vast majority of its total revenue. The company's Blackwell platform alone generated $11 billion in its first quarter of production, the fastest product ramp in Nvidia's history. These numbers speak more than a runaway demand for GPUs; they illustrate Nvidia's absolute grip on the physical infrastructure powering A.I. globally.That reach is increasingly global. In June, Jensen Huang used a trip to South Korea to line up a web of partnerships with SK Group, Naver, LG Group, Hyundai and Doosan. The most important deal was a multi-year agreement with SK Hynix, which helps secure Nvidia’s supply of advanced memory for its Vera Rubin supercomputing platform. SK Telecom also committed to building a gigawatt-scale A.I. cloud environment around Nvidia’s architecture, while Hyundai outlined plans for an A.I. Valley testing hub for autonomous systems. Huang has also used Nvidia’s giant balance sheet as a weapon. Through NVentures, the company’s venture arm, Nvidia has backed a growing list of startups across enterprise software, infrastructure and robotics, giving Huang outsize influence over which young companies get capital, compute and customers. At the same time, he has become one of the loudest public voices on U.S.-China export controls and the politics of semiconductor power, a role that now reaches far beyond Silicon Valley.In May, Huang delivered Carnegie Mellon’s commencement address and made his familiar case that A.I. is less a threat than a tool to be mastered. “A.I. is not likely to replace you,” he told graduates. “But someone using A.I. better than you might. Do not fear the future—guide it.” In July, Nvidia also shipped a limited number of H200 chips to China, a reminder that even amid tighter restrictions, the company still sits at the center of the global contest for compute.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Chairman of Public Investment Fund

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman chairs Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), a $900 billion sovereign wealth fund that backed HUMAIN, a PIF-owned A.I. company that will build data centers, cloud infrastructure, frontier models and A.I. applications.Launched in May of 2025, HUMAIN quickly became the Kingdom's A.I. dealmaking vehicle. Amazon Web Services committed to invest more than $5 billion in an A.I. Zone in Saudi Arabia for AI infrastructure, services and talent development. In May 2025, they expanded their partnership with Nvidia, which agreed to supply hundreds of thousands of GPUs over five years, beginning with 18,000 Blackwell GPUs. AMD announced a $10 billion collaboration to build 500 megawatts of A.I. computing infrastructure over that same time frame.Under Salman’s leadership, in February 2026, HUMAIN invested $3 billion in xAI, becoming a significant minority shareholder before the stake converted into SpaceX equity following Elon Musk's merger of the two companies. HUMAIN's Chat feature, powered by the Arabic-first large language model, ALLaM, targets government and enterprise applications for more than 400 million Arabic speakers. The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) says its programs have trained more than one million Saudis in A.I. skills within a year.

Stephen A. Schwarzman

Chairman, CEO & Co-Founder of Blackstone

Stephen A. Schwarzman has long believed that artificial intelligence will be one of the most significant technological shifts of our lifetime and has positioned Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, as a leading investor across the A.I. value chain. In 2018—long before A.I. was front of mind for most—Schwarzman made a $350 million donation to MIT to establish the Schwarzman College of Computing, a landmark initiative aimed at advancing A.I. research and integrating computing across disciplines. The gift helped reorient MIT to address the opportunities and challenges presented by the rise of A.I., including critical ethical and policy considerations. The following year, he contributed $250 million to Oxford University to establish the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, which opened in 2025 and includes the Institute for Ethics in A.I. This giving catalyzed further investment in A.I. by universities around the world. Schwarzman's early conviction has made Blackstone one of the largest investors in A.I.-related infrastructure in the world—and the largest and most active investor in data centers globally. The firm currently has $150 billion of data center assets, including those under construction, and another $160 billion in the development pipeline. In the first half of 2026, Blackstone announced a new A.I.-native enterprise services company with Anthropic, launched a strategic partnership with Google that includes an initial $5 billion equity commitment to build a U.S.-based TPU-powered cloud platform, took a data center company public (BXDC), and established BXN1, a dedicated platform for investing across the rapidly expanding A.I. ecosystem. In April, Schwarzman joined President Donald Trump in Beijing for a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, alongside other leading CEOs, to advance U.S.-China dialogue on trade, semiconductor exports, artificial intelligence and more.

Microsoft’s $13.8 billion investment in OpenAI translated into a 27 percent stake valued at roughly $135 billion after the company restructured into a public benefit corporation in October 2025. Satya Nadella preserved Microsoft’s rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property through 2032, including future frontier models under the revised agreement. Nadella spent the following months protecting that position. In February, after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI and became the exclusive third-party cloud provider for its Frontier enterprise platform, Microsoft publicly asserted its contractual rights before renegotiating the partnership in April. The revised agreement preserved Microsoft’s nonexclusive IP license through 2032 while keeping Azure as OpenAI’s primary cloud platform. Microsoft’s own A.I. business keeps growing. Azure revenue grew 40 percent year over year in the fiscal third quarter of 2026. Microsoft 365 Copilot crossed 20 million paid seats in April, up from 15 million three months earlier. Microsoft also landed its largest Copilot deployment to date, rolling the software out to roughly 743,000 Accenture employees in April. Rather than owning every frontier model, Nadella is making its product offerings the infrastructure through which enterprises buy, deploy and manage them. As Nadella put it in a long essay on X posted on June 14, “The real opportunity is not in picking the best model but instead in building a learning loop on top of models where human capital and token capital compound.” 

Founder & CEO of DeepSeek

In June 2026, DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng raised more than $7.4 billion in the company’s first external financing round, valuing DeepSeek at more than $50 billion and making it China's most valuable A.I. startup. The round came just 18 months after DeepSeek's R1 model challenged industry assumptions about the cost of training frontier A.I. models, with the chatbot trained for a mere $6 million. Following the June funding round, Liang's net worth has more than doubled to roughly $36 billion, making him the world's richest creator of A.I. models. Only a month after completing its first outside financing, DeepSeek entered preliminary talks for another round that could value the company at roughly $71 billion before the new investment. The company has also reportedly begun preparing for a possible IPO, potentially giving Liang access to public-market capital as DeepSeek builds its own data center and acquires more chips for autonomous A.I. agents.Liang structured the financing to preserve his control. Most investors, including Tencent, CATL, JD.com, NetEase and IDG Capital, invested through a limited partnership that Liang manages, accepted a five-year lock-up and received no voting rights. China's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund invested directly, making it the only major investor to receive voting rights.The financing marks a shift for a company that long rejected outside capital. DeepSeek plans to use the proceeds to expand its compute infrastructure, retain researchers and commercialize its next-generation models, including DeepSeek V4. It will continue its open-weight approach despite U.S. sanctions and export restrictions on advanced chips, seeking innovative ways to achieve more for less.  

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan

UAE National Security Advisor; Chairman of G42 & MGX

Nobody moves A.I. capital at the scale UAE National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan does. Through MGX, he has backed OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Databricks and joined the $500 billion Stargate project as a partner. His G42 holds a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft. In July, the U.S. Commerce Department reclassified the UAE's export status, granting G42 license-free access to buy cutting-edge A.I. chips and servers from firms like Nvidia and AMD. Tahnoon also chairs the $790 billion Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and controls a separate $1.3 trillion business portfolio.President Trump flew to Abu Dhabi in May 2025 and the two countries unveiled Stargate UAE, a 5GW A.I. campus spanning 10 square miles and the largest data center deployment outside the U.S. In March, Tahnoon visited the White House, pledged $1.4 trillion in U.S. investment over a decade, and helped secure 500,000 advanced Nvidia chips annually for the UAE, with one-fifth going to G42.But a $500 million stake in President Trump's family's World Liberty Financial, taken by Tahnoon-backed Aryam Investment in January 2025 and months before the chip deal closed, drew Congressional corruption accusations. Tahnoon has not publicly commented."Today's agreement is a testament to the ongoing collaboration between our countries in artificial intelligence," Tahnoon said at the May 17 unveiling of Phase 1 of a 5-gigawatt A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi. The polished language belies what he built: the largest A.I. infrastructure deal in the Middle East, funded by oil money and sealed with a presidential handshake.

Co-Founder & CEO of Stripe

With 86 percent of the Forbes A.I. 50, 90 percent of the companies in the Dow Jones Index and 80 percent of the NASDAQ 100 using Stripe—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney and Cohere—co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison has positioned the payments platform as a core piece of economic infrastructure behind A.I. companies. At Stripe Sessions 2026 in April, the company said businesses on its platform processed $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent year over year, a growth rate roughly 17 times that of the global economy. In July, Collison expanded a partnership with fintech company Cross River as part of a broader strategy to build out agentic commerce, which allows A.I. agents to make purchases on a user’s behalf with a restricted, single-use virtual card via their Link wallet. The technology is designed to meet strict know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering regulatory requirements. Agentic commerce is poised to reach $1.5 trillion in spending by 2030,  according to Juniper Research, and the firm projects $8 billion in transaction value for 2026. Collison’s advancement in the space, spearheaded in part by its early 2025 acquisition of token infrastructure company Bridge for $1.1 billion, is poised to bring agentic commerce to the mainstream. In 2025, Collison announced features allowing businesses to sell their products inside A.I. apps, with retailers like Kate Spade, Best Buy and Coach using the tools. In April, he built on that by announcing a partnership with Google that, once live, will allow businesses to sell to consumers inside A.I. Mode and the Gemini app. This is in addition to limited instant checkout via ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Meta’s buy now button.Stripe and the private equity firm Advent International reportedly submitted a joint $53 billion offer to acquire PayPal. If completed, the deal would dramatically expand Stripe’s consumer payments reach.

Chairman & CEO of SoftBank Group

Masayoshi Son committed roughly $65 billion to OpenAI, putting SoftBank on track to own about 13 percent of the company after its latest financing closes. In June, SoftBank overtook Toyota as Japan's most valuable company for the first time in 22 years, driven by gains in its OpenAI investment, a nearly 20 percent rally in Arm Holdings following Nvidia's May earnings and renewed expectations of an OpenAI IPO.Son, SoftBank Group chairman and CEO, also chairs Stargate, the $500 billion A.I. infrastructure venture backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX. In January, SoftBank and OpenAI each invested $500 million in SB Energy to build Stargate's first 1.2-gigawatt data center campus in Texas. The venture's first international deployment, Stargate UAE, will provide frontier A.I. infrastructure and model access across government and commercial institutions in the United Arab Emirates.Son has continued recycling capital into A.I. To help finance OpenAI and Stargate, SoftBank exited its Nvidia position while retaining its stake in Arm, valued at roughly $180 billion, its largest strategic asset, as of June. In July, SoftBank reopened negotiations on a $10 billion margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake to finance additional A.I. investments, extending Son's strategy of using existing A.I. assets to fund the next wave of infrastructure.

Founder of Khosla Ventures

In 2019, Vinod Khosla wrote a $50 million check to OpenAI at a $1 billion valuation, becoming the company’s first institutional investor. Seven years later, on March 31, OpenAI closed a $122 billion round at an $852 billion valuation. Khosla, whose eponymous VC is raising $3.5 billion across new flagship, growth and seed funds, continues to deploy capital across the full A.I. stack. He doubled down on OpenAI through a $405 million special-purpose vehicle in October 2024. In January 2026, he co-led Emergent's $70 million Series B alongside SoftBank after the coding-agent startup reached 5 million users and $50 million in annual recurring revenue within seven months. Two months later, he backed Rhoda AI, a robotics company, in a $450 million Series A. He also continued investing in fusion companies, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems' $863 million financing and Realta Fusion to generate the energy needed to power A.I. infrastructure. 

In 2023, Lisa Su bet AMD's data center roadmap on a precise technical judgment: large model inference would be memory-constrained, not compute-constrained. The resulting MI300X launched with 192GB of HBM3—more than twice the capacity of Nvidia’s dominant H100. Microsoft, Meta and Oracle rushed to qualify it, and AMD’s data center revenue soared to $5.8 billion in Q1 2026, officially eclipsing Intel’s data center business for the first time in an opening quarter.That bet has now solidified 12 gigawatts of committed infrastructure. OpenAI signed a landmark 6-gigawatt agreement to anchor its long-term data center buildout with AMD’s next-generation Instinct MI450 platform, and Meta quickly followed with an identical 6-gigawatt, $60 billion commitment. To lock in these multi-year buildouts, AMD issued both OpenAI and Meta performance-based warrants for 160 million shares apiece—representing a potential 10 percent equity stake for each company. When a customer demands ownership of its supplier's upside, they stop looking for alternatives.Beyond commercial hyperscalers, Su is aggressively redirecting state-level infrastructure and academic spend. In June 2026, Su took the stage at London Tech Week to announce a massive £2 billion ($2.5 billion) five-year investment funding the U.K.'s flagship national A.I. supercomputers—"Zenith" at Cambridge and the fusion-focused "Sunrise"—while establishing a strategic collaboration with Imperial College London to optimize A.I. algorithms across health care, climate modeling and data-intensive computational sciences.Just days after President Trump's visit to China in May, Su traveled to Beijing to meet with Chinese officials and pledge deeper operations and investments in China—despite aggressive U.S. export restrictions. Yet, even as she coordinates multibillion-dollar hardware pipelines across corporate and national borders, Su remains fiercely vocal about the human element behind the machines. Delivering the MIT Commencement Address to the Class of 2026, she urged the graduates to remember that technology itself does not choose the future. "The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools," Su said. "It needs people who know what to use them for. People with a sense of purpose. Judgment. Courage."The TSMC 2nm-based MI450 launches in late 2026. With Intel's Diamond Rapids architecture slipping out to mid-2027, Su commands the only alternative to Nvidia at hyperscale. 

Co-Founder & General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz

On July 9, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh named Marc Andreessen co-lead of a Federal Reserve task force on A.I., productivity and jobs. In 2026, Andreessen's firm reached over $100 billion in assets under management, cementing its status as the world’s largest venture capital firm. This includes the $15 billion in new capital the company raised in 2025, over $3 billion of which will flow into a16z’s A.I.-driven applications and infrastructure funds. With new investments in A.I. apps like Town and Lassie, the firm is set to continue riding the A.I. boom. A16z provided $115.5 million in political funding during the 2026 election cycle, including $50 million to the pro-A.I. Super PAC Leading the Future, which funds ad campaigns against candidates who promise to regulate A.I. This spring, Andreessen was one of 13 leaders appointed to a position on President Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.Andreessen remains a staple within mainstream technology discourse. The a16z Substack reaches 250,000 subscribers, and the firm’s podcast regularly ranks in the top 10 of technology shows. Andreessen has 3.5 million followers on X, where he promotes ideas and voices that push back against growing A.I. skepticism. Recent appearances on Joe Rogan and Lenny Rachitsky’s podcasts have kept him in front of general audiences, opportunities he has used to advance both his investment portfolio and his broader pro-technology worldview.

Behind Anthropic’s unprecedented valuation surge—from $61.5 billion in March 2025 to $965 billion in May of this year—is chief financial officer Krishna Rao, who disclosed in May that existing customers spent 5x more on Claude than they did a year prior. Under Rao’s financing guidance, Anthropic has added about $96 million in annualized revenue per day, going from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion by mid-2026. By April, more than 1,000 enterprise accounts crossed the $1 million annual spend threshold with Anthropic.Rao shifted the company toward a multi-platform compute strategy with chips from Nvidia, Google and Amazon. This included a $30 billion agreement for Microsoft servers powered by Nvidia chips, securing up to one million Google Cloud tensor processing units for as much as $50 billion and a multi-gigawatt, $36 billion compute acquisition through Broadcom and Google extending into 2027. Propelled by an API business boasting more than 80 percent gross margins, Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO, with secondary markets already valuing the company around $1.2 trillion. Rao participated in a court declaration in March warning that the Pentagon's supply-chain risk designation against Anthropic "could reduce [the company’s] revenue by multiple billions of dollars.” Anthropic formally challenged the designation with two federal lawsuits that incurred mixed results.

Co-Founder & CEO of Cerebras Systems

In May, Andrew Feldman’s Cerebras Systems went public in an IPO that valued the company at more than $55 billion. After withdrawing its initial attempt to go public in 2025—following regulatory scrutiny over the UAE-based A.I. firm G42, which accounted for 87 percent of Cerebras’ revenue in early 2024—Feldman, co-founder and CEO of the semiconductor, supercomputer and software development company, expanded Cerebras’ U.S. client base and received regulatory clearance. In January, Feldman signed a $20 billion deal with OpenAI, in part to provide the A.I. giant with 750 megawatts of computing capacity through 2028. By March, he entered into a multi-year partnership of undisclosed value with Amazon Web Services."I don't think there are many examples in history where monopoly was good for an ecosystem," Feldman tells Observer. Most chips before Cerebras, he explains, "were the size of a postage stamp. We built a chip the size of a dinner plate—fifty-eight times larger." That scale, he says, is what lets Cerebras (a loud competitor of Nvidia) deliver inference speeds Feldman put at 15 times faster than its closest competitor.At last week’s RAISE Summit in Paris, Feldman announced a major expansion of Cerebras’ European infrastructure footprint, with plans to bring its first European data center capacity online by the end of this year and to expand total capacity to 200 megawatts by the end of 2027."Some of the first movers and some of the early actions of data center builders were misguided. They sought to push off some cost on local power utilities... and they were wasteful in their use of resources, none of which is necessary," Feldman tells Observer. Cerebras uses closed-loop water cooling to minimize its footprint. "We think it's reasonable to pay our own way,” Feldman says. “Data centers should be profitable without pushing off costs on the local community."Despite a 94-percent increase in first-quarter revenue year over year, Cerebras announced a plan to mitigate short-term supply bottlenecks: Temporarily renting back its own systems from an existing client while it builds out more data center capacity in places like the UAE, Australia, Singapore, India and Indonesia.

CEO & President of Qualcomm

As the cornerstone of Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon's diversification bet, Snapdragon Cockpit and Ride Platforms now power more than 75 million vehicles worldwide. Automotive revenue crossed $1 billion in a single quarter for the first time in late fiscal 2025, charting a 36 percent year-over-year surge to $3.96 billion. In January, Volkswagen Group signed a letter of intent making Qualcomm the primary chip supplier for its software-defined vehicle architecture, built through its joint venture with Rivian. Stellantis followed in May, expanding Snapdragon across ADAS, cockpit and connectivity for its next-generation lineup. In June, Qualcomm announced its entry into the data center market, with an A.I. infrastructure strategy and fiscal 2029 revenue target of more than $15 billion. At the same event (Qualcomm’s Investor Day), the company announced that it has nearly doubled non-smartphone revenue targets to $40 billion, increased its automotive revenue target to $10 billion by fiscal 2029 and expanded its automotive design-win pipeline to $65 billion. At Investor Day, the company stated it is on track to become the largest pure-play automotive semiconductor supplier globally.At Davos in January, Amon said, "Whoever has presence on the edge is going to win. The edge is where the humans are." The edge-first strategy found its clearest enterprise proof point at Build 2026, where Microsoft unveiled Project Solara with Qualcomm silicon powering the wearable badge concept. CVS Health, Best Buy, Target and Levi's are already in pilots. Over the past year, Amon has spoken about Qualcomm's role in enabling the next wave of A.I. devices, noting that the company is working on more than 40 A.I. devices and partnering with virtually all of the major players developing this new category.That OpenAI reportedly bypassed Qualcomm in May, pivoting to a customized MediaTek Dimensity 9600 for its A.I.-agent smartphone, appears to have little impact on the future company. 

Co-Founder & CTO of Oracle

Larry Ellison continues Oracle’s shift in focus from legacy on-premise software to A.I.-focused cloud hosting, with the company’s cloud revenue jumping 39 percent in fiscal year 2026 to $34 billion, just over half of its $67.4 billion total revenue for the year. Ellison directed the majority of Oracle’s $55.6 billion capital expenditures for the year to building out advanced data centers. Critics argue Ellison’s efforts to win the A.I. race are unsustainable, but Oracle rests on a $638 billion backlog in A.I. infrastructure contracts (a 363-percent increase from 2025). To support Ellison’s A.I. infrastructure expansion, the company plans to raise $40 billion in debt and equity for fiscal year 2027.Ellison is a key backer in the Trump administration’s Stargate project, a $500 billion privately funded initiative to build massive data centers across the United States using Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. The initiative has so far resulted in projects like the Stargate data center in Texas, which is built with 450,000 Nvidia GPUs (worth $40 billion) and leased to OpenAI and Microsoft. Ellison’s network extends further, including a $300 billion, five-year contract with OpenAI in which Oracle Cloud Infrastructure........

© Observer