Who Will Win the AI Gold Rush? And Who Is Really Selling the Pickaxes?
The AI Industry Feels Like a Gold Rush
Recently, I have been seeing a lot of news about AI companies going public or raising huge amounts of capital.
They raised billions of dollars.
Their valuation reached trillions of yen.
Every time I see this kind of news, I think the same thing.
The AI industry is now completely in a gold rush.
Who Really Made Money in the Gold Rush?
Who actually made money during the gold rush?
If you like history, you have probably heard this story at least once.
It was not the small number of people who found gold.
It was the merchants who sold shovels to them.
The merchants who sold tents.
The merchants who provided lodging.
In other words, the people who sold the tools needed to dig for gold were the ones who made money.
That is why people in investing often say:
“Sell pickaxes instead of searching for gold mines.”
Who Are the Pickaxe Sellers in AI?
So who are the pickaxe sellers in the AI industry?
At first, I thought about this very simply.
OpenAI and Anthropic.
They sell AI.
So they must be the pickaxe sellers of the AI era.
But recently, I have started to question that idea.
OpenAI and Anthropic May Be Miners
The reason is that OpenAI and Anthropic are not exactly printing money.
If anything, they are receiving enormous investment while spending enormous amounts of money.
They buy GPUs.
They build data centers.
They hire researchers.
They train new models.
They build the next model.
Then they buy more GPUs.
When I listen to these stories, they sound less like merchants selling tools and more like mining companies digging through mountains with massive machines.
The Legendary Gold Vein Called AGI
Seen from that angle, the picture changes.
OpenAI and Anthropic are not the pickaxe sellers.
They may be the giant gold miners themselves.
They are digging for the legendary gold vein called AGI.
Of course, they sell some of the gold dust they find along the way in the form of APIs.
But the real target is further ahead.
That is why growth matters more than profit.
Right now, they are still in the mining phase.
Then Who Are the Real Pickaxe Sellers?
So who are the real pickaxe sellers?
There are many candidates.
NVIDIA, which sells GPUs.
Data center operators.
Power companies.
Semiconductor manufacturing equipment companies.
Cooling equipment manufacturers.
Whether the AI boom continues or ends, the equipment still gets sold for now.
These companies do feel very pickaxe-like.
We May Only Know in Hindsight
Decades from now, when people look back at this period, they might say:
“The companies selling GPUs made more money than the companies chasing AGI.”
Or perhaps the opposite future could arrive:
“Even NVIDIA was only another mining company.”
Honestly, right now it is hard to tell who is the gold miner and who is selling the pickaxes.
But there is one thing I can say for sure.
At least the engineers around me have not become extremely rich yet.
AI has made our work faster.
It has made things more convenient.
But I have not heard anyone say their salary became ten times higher.
In the end, maybe both the gold rush era and the AI era are like that for most participants.
We watch the news from far away saying that another billionaire has been created, and then we simply go back to work as usual.