Azeem Azhar

And in the last couple of weeks, there were changes in leadership at OpenAI, not the chaotic changes that we've seen over the past year with co-founders leaving, but Fiji Sumo, who's a very, very well regarded executive, was previously the CEO of Instacart, has come in to be the CEO of applications in OpenAI, a

requiring another AI company to bring the founder there on as CTO so that Sam Altman can, rumor has it, work on the big framing of open AI and global AI infrastructure.

So there is something that is being put together around thinking about how do we build an organization that can take advantage of our technology, our brand, our distribution, and our growth rates.

To get to that $1.5 trillion number, it implies big increase scale in the business.

But when you turn back that $174 billion revenue number in 2030, you take off Microsoft's cut, whether it's 10% or 20% by that time.

and you turn that into multiples, it looks a little bit expensive, certainly more expensive than Meta is today, but much cheaper than, say, a Tesla is today as well.

So the bit that surprised me in all of this when I did this pencil maths, and actually I looked at some other people's work, was that there is sort of this credible path.

I mean, it's not impossible.

There is a path towards that number.

Of course,

to be doing $170 billion of revenue in 2030 means that the market has to be much, much bigger than that.

So how big could that AI market be?

Well, today, although it's relatively hard to measure estimates of the generative AI market in 2025,

end up as between about, let's say, $40 and $45 billion across infrastructure and apps, which is pretty remarkable considering there was none just a few years ago.

It means that OpenAI probably has a rather less than 30% share.

If they held that share through to 2030, that would imply $550, $580 billion in AI spend.

If they lost some of that share, which

would seem reasonable as competition emerges, that would imply an even bigger market approaching about $850, maybe $900 billion.

Again, I'm estimating these numbers a little bit.

None of this is financial advice.