Investors Just Wasted $13B on Anthropic Because They Don’t Get AI Is Regional

#ai #llm #news #openai

Every AI pitch deck right now uses the same line:

"We're building the AWS of intelligence. Foundational infra. Picks and shovels for the AI gold rush."

That framing is why valuations are sky-high, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, everyone's being priced like they'll own the entire world's cognition layer.

But here's the reality: AI isn't SaaS. It's strategic infrastructure.

🌍 No Country Will Outsource Its Brain

Would China let an American telco own its 5G towers?
Would Russia let a U.S. company run its power grid?
Would India let foreign firms control its satellites?

HELL NO. Those are national sovereignty issues.

AI is the same. A nation's "thought layer", how its population, military, and corporations interface with cognition, is too important to outsource.

That's why:

China is banned from OpenAI and they are building Baidu/Alibaba/Huawei stacks.
The EU is funding LLaMA distillations and Mistral.
The UAE launched Falcon.
India is openly talking about AI sovereignty.

🪓 The Coming Fracture

So let's be blunt: the "global monopoly" story is fantasy.

Best case: U.S. firms dominate the U.S./allied bloc (NATO, Japan, South Korea).
Real case: the world fragments into blocs, each with their own sovereign stacks.

Think telecom, energy grids, or even chip fabs. Strategic, bloc-bound, heavily regulated.

🤪 Why Are Valuations Still Insane?

Because capital markets don't care, yet.

They want exposure to AI at any price.
Scarcity of investable names means money piles into the same 5 - 6 firms.
Investors are betting they can IPO or flip before the physics hit.

It's the dot-com playbook: sell the dream now, let the next guy 🫵 eat the hangover.

🧨 The Knife Edge

Once sovereign distillation stacks mature, cheap, local, trained on domestic data, the "picks and shovels" narrative dies.

OpenAI doesn't become the AWS of cognition. It becomes the American AWS of cognition. Still huge, but not global.

And that's a very different valuation story.

🔑 Takeaway

If you're a dev or founder, don't build assuming one company will run the world's AI layer.
Build for a fractured landscape: U.S. bloc, China bloc, EU bloc, Middle East bloc, Global South bloc.

The winners won't just be who trained the biggest model. They'll be who own distribution, compliance, and trust inside their bloc.

😊 Hot-take over. Curious what you think: Do you buy the dream of a single AI brain for humanity, or the reality of many smaller, walled-off brains?