The narrative around AI competition tends to follow a familiar script: one company wins, everyone else loses. But IO Fund lead tech analyst Beth Kindig has a different take, and the numbers back her up.
In a recent interview, Kindig challenged the zero-sum thinking that's been dominating tech investment circles. Sure, Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) (GOOGL) and OpenAI are competing, but treating them as gladiators in a winner-takes-all arena misses something fundamental about the scale of what's happening here.
The Math That Changes Everything
Here's the thing: AI is projected to add somewhere between $15 trillion and $20 trillion to global GDP. When you're talking about a market that massive, the idea that only one company can succeed starts to look a bit silly.
Google got "written off" before its stock soared. OpenAI has faced its own waves of scrutiny. But Kindig's point is that both can thrive because the real battle isn't just about consumer search anymore. The value is in "embedding the large language model into as many applications and enterprise workloads as possible," and both companies are busy locking down major partnerships in that space.
The Meta Surprise Nobody Saw Coming
Speaking of companies that got written off, remember when everyone was rolling their eyes at Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse obsession? Turns out Meta Platforms Inc. (META) has been quietly building something significant on the AI front.
Kindig dropped a surprising stat: Meta is now the second-largest generator of AI revenue, behind only Nvidia. The company is running at a $60 billion annual rate on AI revenue. That's not a typo.
If Meta keeps shifting resources away from Reality Labs and its AR/VR projects and doubles down on AI instead, Kindig sees the stock as a "buy soon." The company has matured considerably since its previous market stumbles, and the AI story is just starting to get interesting.
The Constraint Nobody's Talking About Enough
There's a physical reality check coming for all this AI ambition: power. You can't run massive data centers and train enormous AI models without electricity, and the grid is already stretched thin.
Big Tech is increasingly forced to build its own power infrastructure, which creates opportunities in unexpected places. Kindig highlighted Bloom Energy Corp. (BE) as a key beneficiary of this trend. Their solid oxide fuel cells provide on-site, off-grid power generation that can be deployed in months rather than years, solving the immediate energy crunch that comes with rapid AI expansion.
The broader point Kindig makes is refreshingly clear-eyed: AI isn't a game where one company wins and everyone else goes home. The opportunity is too big, the applications too diverse, and the infrastructure needs too complex for that kind of simplistic thinking. When you're dealing with a $20 trillion opportunity, there's room for multiple winners, some obvious surprises, and probably a few companies we haven't even started paying attention to yet.
