# AI Sector The AI industry is the largest concentration of private capital in history assembling itself in real time — trillion-dollar-scale valuations, gigawatt datacenters, and a political spending machine modeled explicitly on crypto's. It is also the tech right's main power base. This sector MOC maps the corporate landscape; [[Silicon Valley AI Ecosystem]] covers the ideological network, and [[Chipmakers Sector]] covers the hardware substrate. ## The frontier labs As of mid-2026 the lab hierarchy has consolidated around a few poles: - **[[OpenAI]]** — completed its October 2025 restructuring into OpenAI Group PBC (the nonprofit foundation retains ~26%); raised ~$122B at an $852B valuation with [[SoftBank]], [[NVIDIA]], [[Microsoft]], and [[Amazon]] money; filed confidentially for a ~September 2026 IPO. [[Elon Musk]]'s suit to block the conversion was dismissed by a jury in May 2026. - **[[Anthropic]]** — now the most valuable AI startup after a $65B Series H at $965B post-money (May 2026), with run-rate revenue past $47B; also filed confidentially for IPO. The dual OpenAI/Anthropic IPO wave is the defining capital-markets story of 2026. - **[[xAI]]** — absorbed by [[SpaceX]] in a February 2026 all-stock deal valuing it around $250B, after xAI had already swallowed X — folding Musk's social platform, AI lab, and rocket company into a single entity with massive federal contract exposure. Its Colossus site in Memphis (2 GW, ~555K GPUs) is the largest single training installation. - **[[Meta Superintelligence Labs]]** — [[Mark Zuckerberg]]'s $14.3B purchase of 49% of [[Scale AI]] brought [[Alexandr Wang]] in to run superintelligence efforts; the April 2026 Muse model family marks Meta's retreat from open-source purism, though it remains widely judged behind the leaders. - **[[Google DeepMind]]** — Gemini 3.1 Pro (February 2026) kept [[Alphabet]] at the frontier. - Second tier: [[Mistral]] (Europe's champion, reportedly raising ~€3B at ~€20B), [[Safe Superintelligence]] ([[Ilya Sutskever]]'s ~$32B no-product bet, which took $5B from [[NVIDIA]] in July 2026 — see [[NVIDIA-Safe Superintelligence Investment]]), [[Thinking Machines Lab]] (Mira Murati; a $50B round collapsed in January 2026), [[Perplexity]] (~$20B+), and Anysphere's [[Cursor]] (~$4B annualized revenue by mid-2026). [[Hugging Face]] remains the open-source commons. ## Datacenters, capital, and the bubble question [[Stargate]] — the OpenAI/[[Oracle Corporation]]/SoftBank venture — has committed over $400B toward ~7 GW across Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and beyond. Meta's Prometheus (Ohio) and Hyperion (Louisiana, up to 5 GW) follow. The buildout collides with local energy politics (see [[Nuclear Energy Debate]]) and feeds the bubble discourse: Michael Burry calls [[NVIDIA]] "the Cisco of the bubble" and alleges circular financing — Nvidia investing up to $100B in OpenAI, which buys Nvidia chips through Oracle datacenters — overstates sector profits by ~$176B. 87% of venture capital now flows to AI. ## Politics: deregulation plus a war chest The [[AI Action Plan]] (July 2025) set the "go faster" agenda, with [[David Sacks]] as AI and crypto czar. A December 2025 executive order created a DOJ "AI Litigation Task Force" to sue states over their AI laws — a preemption push widely expected to face constitutional challenge. Chip export policy whipsawed: the H20 China ban reversed in July 2025 after [[Jensen Huang]]'s lobbying, then H200 sales were approved in December 2025 with a ~25% Treasury revenue cut — though Beijing has blocked actual shipments (see [[Chip Export Controls]]). On the spending side, [[Leading the Future]] — the $125M+ super-PAC network funded by [[Andreessen Horowitz]], [[Greg Brockman]], [[Joe Lonsdale]], and [[Perplexity]] — is explicitly modeled on [[Fairshake PAC]] and has already spent ~$23.5M targeting AI-skeptic candidates in the 2026 midterms. See [[AI Political Spending Ecosystem]] for the full map, and [[AI Safety]] / [[AI Doomerism]] / [[Effective Accelerationism]] for the ideological battlefield. **Who lobbies for this sector:** the AI majors are top-20 demand-side spenders in their own right — [[Meta]] ($26.3M in 2025, biggest single-company spender), [[Amazon]] ($18.9M), [[Alphabet]] ($16.5M) — see the demand-side table on the [[Lobbying Hub]]. On the hired-gun side, [[Invariant]]'s AI practice and [[Mehlman Consulting]] (AMD, Adobe, [[Andreessen Horowitz]]) rode the AI-lobbying surge (roughly one in four K Street lobbyists now touch AI issues), and [[Miller Strategies]] carries [[OpenAI]]. ## Coverage gaps Now built: [[Oracle Corporation]] (Stargate's datacenter arm and debt-risk poster child) and [[Leading the Future]] (the PAC network). Still missing: CoreWeave and the neocloud layer, Nebius, Groq, Cerebras, Together AI, ElevenLabs, Black Forest Labs/Flux, Midjourney, Runway, Suno, and Mira Murati as a person. Highest remaining value: CoreWeave — the leveraged infrastructure layer where a bubble unwind would show up first. ## See Also - [[OpenAI]] · [[Anthropic]] · [[xAI]] · [[Google DeepMind]] · [[Meta Superintelligence Labs]] · [[Mistral]] - [[Safe Superintelligence]] · [[Thinking Machines Lab]] · [[Perplexity]] · [[Cursor]] · [[Scale AI]] · [[Hugging Face]] - [[AI Action Plan]] · [[AI Arms Race]] · [[Stargate]] · [[Oracle Corporation]] · [[David Sacks]] · [[Leading the Future]] · [[AI Political Spending Ecosystem]] - [[Silicon Valley AI Ecosystem]] · [[AI Ethics and Safety Ecosystem]] — the ideological networks - [[Size of Companies by Number of Employees]] — headcount reference for the sector roster - [[Chipmakers Sector]] — the hardware substrate · [[Quantum Computing Sector]] — the adjacent frontier bet