A new crop of artificial intelligence startups has shaken up Silicon Valley — and the wider business world — throughout this year, but there’s one thing that hasn’t changed: Big Tech still wields power.
In the wake of Microsoft Corp.’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January, other tech giants raced to partner with leading AI startups through funding and cloud computing deals. Salesforce Inc. led a round in Hugging Face at a $4.5 billion valuation. Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. invested billions in OpenAI rival Anthropic. And Nvidia Corp. seemed to back almost every AI startup of note.
