For the past few years, public market exposure to artificial intelligence has largely meant buying a handful of companies that sit underneath the models themselves.
Microsoft was the primary conduit to OpenAI, investing more than $13 billion and embedding its systems across Azure and Office.
Alphabet and Amazon have taken a similar role with Anthropic, backing the company with multi-billion-dollar commitments while integrating its models into their cloud ecosystems.
And in the middle of the compute layer sits Nvidia, which has a data center segment that has become increasingly tied to demand from AI training and inference workloads.
Together, these firms have defined what investors think of as the "AI trade," not ownership of the models, but ownership of the systems that make them possible.
