A prominent venture capitalist says OpenAI is shaping itself into a vertically integrated AI powerhouse, drawing comparisons to Apple’s strategy of controlling everything from silicon to software.
In a new CNBC interview, Plexo Capital’s Lo Toney says OpenAI’s recent moves signal a deliberate push to own each layer of the AI stack — from chip development and data-center build-out to what may soon be a new wave of end-user applications.
According to Toney, he’s seen this playbook before, one that propelled Apple to a $4 trillion market cap.
“Now this is starting to look more like OpenAI is using the Apple playbook and really owning the entire vertical stack. So the ability to do the deals at the chip layer, now we’re seeing orchestration and diversification with these data centers. I think next what we look for is for OpenAI to move up and do some exciting things at the application layer.”
He adds that the strategy is designed to improve economics and influence across the AI ecosystem as capital flows into infrastructure, model development and emerging agent-driven apps.
“What all of this means is more control for OpenAI along all of these different layers, as well as increasing the margins by going after these different lines of business.”
In September, OpenAI signed a $10 billion deal with Broadcom to develop custom AI chips designed to power the next versions of ChatGPT. In the same month, the company inked a $300 billion compute contract with Oracle to secure 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.
Earlier this week, the ChatGPT creator signed a seven-year, $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in an effort to secure access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips.
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