The Quiet Consolidation
The AI map at the start of 2025 looks less like a Cambrian explosion and more like an early oil patch.
Six months ago the conventional view of the generative-AI sector held that a long tail of specialist model providers would coexist with three or four general-purpose frontier labs. That view has, very quietly, stopped being conventional.
What is forming instead looks more like the consolidation phase of an extractive industry: a small number of vertically integrated operators who own the chips, the data-center capacity, the leading frontier model, and — increasingly — the application layer that sits on top of it.
Tech Editor based in San Francisco. Covers AI infrastructure and the people building it.
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