Q1 alone saw the Big Four spend $130 billion combined — 3.7× the $35 billion they spent in Q1 2023.

The price tag of the AI gold rush: $725 billion. Will it pay off?

Amazon is investing $5 billion in Anthropic today, with up to an additional $20 billion in the future. This builds on the $8 billion Amazon has previously invested.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described superintelligence in a blog post last year

OpenAI pledged $1.5B to a joint venture called DeployCo, guaranteeing private-equity partners a 17% annual return floor over five years.

Companies and investors put $6.1 billion into humanoid robots in 2025 alone, four times what was invested in 2024.

Huge advances have been made in developing and building more capable models, driven by record investments—forecast by Gartner to grow to around $2.5 trillion in 2026 alone. In contrast, the investment in understanding how the technology works has been minuscule.

OpenAI shelves Stargate UK in blow to Britain's AI ambitions

they don’t have to spend it to win. It’s a defensive move for them, if they commit $50B, OpenAI and Anthropic need to go raise $100B each to stay competitive

AMI Labs is not building a product for immediate deployment. This is a fundamental research effort, likely measured in years before commercial applications emerge.

The clustering of capital and talent around this problem is itself a signal. The applications that most clearly benefit from world models are those where LLMs have struggled most.