Three names you never see on screen - but you pay all three while you type into ChatGPT.
Oracle sounds like a company from the 90s, because that's exactly what it is - corporate databases, an old-fashioned reputation. In the AI race it became the fourth big supplier of cloud computing power, after Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Its real role is building center-scale data facilities (buildings full of computers that process requests) for Stargate - OpenAI's massive AI infrastructure in Texas. The problem: Oracle is the only one of the big players financing this madness with debt - over 100 billion dollars on the books, while free cash flow is already in the red. It has staked its reputation on OpenAI surviving and paying off what it agreed to, for decades ahead.
Broadcom is the company most people confuse with the processor in their phone, but it does something else - it designs custom chips for the biggest players in the industry. With OpenAI it birthed a chip named Jalapeño (hot pepper, literally) - built for one thing: answering questions fast and cheap, instead of training new models. From idea to finished design took nine months - the fastest cycle for a chip like this, as far as publicly known. The logic behind the move is clear: OpenAI doesn't want to depend entirely on Nvidia, the leading maker of AI processors, or on its prices.
SoftBank doesn't build anything and doesn't write code - it is the money. A Japanese investment conglomerate led by Masayoshi Son, a man known as much for brilliant bets (he owns Arm, whose chip designs sit in almost every phone on the planet) as for catastrophic ones (he poured billions into WeWork, a shared-office company, before it collapsed loudly). Now he's betting again - on Stargate, on energy companies, even hinting he'd take out a loan against his own stake in OpenAI to fund further construction. Hear an AI investment with a lot of zeros, and the odds SoftBank is somewhere in the structure are high.
There's a live wire here
The more I read about the three of them, the more it looks like a construction site where the architect is known, but nobody asks exactly whose name the land is mortgaged under. Oracle took on the debt. Broadcom took on the engineering risk of nine months that usually take years. SoftBank took on the bet that Masayoshi Son has already made before, and lost spectacularly at least once.
I'm not a cynic about it - I believe infrastructure has to be built by someone, and better a giant with a balance sheet than a startup with hope. But as someone who builds systems, I know one thing: when three different companies each hold up one corner of the same building, ask who falls first if the wind picks up. The answer usually isn't the one whose logo you see on screen.