The current AI wave is a never-ending barrage of news items.
To understand what I mean, ask yourself how long you spent considering the fact that Amazon put another $2.75 billion into Anthropic AI last week.
We’ve become inured to the capital influx that is now common in AI, even as the headline numbers get even bigger.
Sure, Amazon is slinging cash at Anthropic, but single-digit billions are chump change compared to what some companies have planned.
Hell, even smaller tech companies — compared to the true giants — are spending to stay on the cutting edge.
Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September.
The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.
Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic.
Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red.
We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.
Today, KKR added to that growing total when it announced it was going to acquire Broadcom’s end user computing business for $4 billion.
These pieces include VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon, two remote desktop applications that had been part of the VMware family of products.
Almost immediately, Broadcom began slashing costs, starting with laying off over 2000 VMware employees, just a week after the deal was official.
KKR managing director Bradley Brown still sees a lot of room for growth moving forward to build out the EUC (end user computing) division into a vibrant stand-alone business.
One interesting aspect of this deal is that KKR intends to implement an employee ownership program, giving employees a chance to own equity in the new company alongside KKR.
