$160 billion. Three companies. Sixty days.

“We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making good time.” — Yogi Berra

That is more money being injected by three companies than every venture capitalist in America invested in every startup in 2023, combined.

Kenya has 56 million people living and working very hard towards earning a living in its economy. Just about the entirety of Kenya’s economic output, roughly $119 billion a year, exchanged hands within an afternoon in a single transaction.

When the numbers stop behaving

Eleven months ago, OpenAI was valued at $300 billion. Today, a mere 330 days later, that number is $730 billion. This means that SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon are willing to defend the claim that OpenAI generated more than $17,000 in value per second for 28,512,000 seconds, nonstop.

When I posted about Anthropic in January, the number was $17,361 per second. OpenAI and Anthropic are now running neck-and-neck in a race that did not exist three years ago.

Compute trumps cash in the bank

A significant portion of the round that OpenAI just finished is in services, not cash. OpenAI has promised to build its stateful computing engine on Amazon’s infrastructure while keeping the stateless one on Azure, which has recently traded its exclusivity on compute in exchange for first dibs on their intellectual property should OpenAI be all bark and no bite.

The cash injection they will receive is significantly lower than the quoted $110 billion figure, and nobody is saying by how much.

A different type of war machine

The top three funded companies in this race — OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI — raised $160 billion in the past sixty days. The entire African continent spends a third of that on its defence, roughly $50-$55 billion, each fiscal year.

These three companies raised the equivalent of the defence budget of 54 countries in 60 days.

The bottom line is that we are either watching the most important race of capital expansion in human history, or the most expensive living-room play ever staged. Where the kids wrote the script, the parents bought the tickets, and nobody knows if the curtain goes up on act two.

I said it in January, and I will say it again: I do not know which one it is. But we are going to find out.