OOn this side of the Atlantic, we often wonder why Europe fails to create digital champions comparable to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. The answer is known. It is the meeting of a unified market, a talent pool, a liquid and deep financial ecosystem and large, very generous companies.
The announcement, Wednesday, March 27, of Amazon’s investment in the young artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic is a demonstration of this. The emperor of online commerce will commit 2.75 billion dollars (2.5 billion euros) to the company, after 1.25 billion in September 2023. With 4 billion in total, this is the largest investment in another company in the entire history of Amazon. In one year, Anthropic, neither the first nor the largest in the AI sector, managed to raise $7.3 billion. Competitor OpenAI raised 13 billion thanks to Microsoft.
By comparison, French champion Mistral AI has raised almost €400 million in less than a year. Twenty times less. In a business where significant investment is required to train software, this difference is critical.
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According to Wall Street JournalIn 2023, American capitalism invested nearly $29 billion in artificial intelligence. Finally, the French have no champions in their field in the Old Continent to compensate for the weakness of investors. In addition to Amazon and Microsoft, Google has invested 2 billion in Anthropic.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google are all the more comfortable spending mountains of dollars in this sector because they are the primary beneficiaries. This money raised by AI startups is being spent massively by the owners of large data centers to train and run their software. That is… at their home.
For example, Anthropic will spend $2 billion at Google and $4 billion at Amazon. Even the French Mistral has signed a contract with Microsoft. So Big Tech will quickly regain their importance. Magic. But beware of the judges who may have a different assessment of this strange symbiosis, which threatens not only European entrepreneurs! In the meantime, artificial intelligence will not escape the hunger of the internet giants.