AI labs amass $150B war chest to ride out bubble risk

The numbers here are eye-watering even by 2025 standards. A combined $150 billion directed at frontier labs and core AI infrastructure effectively gives the leading players several years of runway, even if capital markets turn hostile or commercial revenue disappoints. That level of pre‑funding makes it much less likely that a short‑term AI downturn would materially slow research on ever-larger models or more capable agents.

Strategically, this “fortress balance sheet” mindset entrenches the current leaders. If OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and a handful of others can continue to buy scarce compute, talent and data at this scale, it becomes vastly harder for late entrants to catch up on raw capability. It also pushes competition away from just model training and into downstream differentiation—vertical tooling, distribution and integration.

For the race to AGI, this capital wall accelerates timelines more than it cushions risk. It virtually guarantees that experiments with more agentic architectures, longer context windows and embodied systems will be funded aggressively. But it also increases the chance that safety and governance efforts will be playing catch‑up against organizations that are now financially insulated from normal market discipline.