The AI gold rush is over. The emperors are cashing out

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:01)
Last Thursday, Anthropic, the AI company that was founded by Dario Amadei, raised $65 billion in a single funding round, putting its valuation at nearly a trillion dollars, more than every other AI company on this planet. On the same day, the company announced that its revenue had grown from $9 billion a year ago to $47 billion annual run rate today. And then, just days later, on the 1st of June, Anthropic filed confidentially for a US IPO. The company that four years ago was a little-known alleged OpenAI spinoff is now racing to become a publicly traded trillion-dollar company. Now, what made this funding round a bit different from the others before it, though, was who showed up to write the checks. Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynex. These are the companies that manufacture the chips that make AI run. All of them invested. What makes this really interesting is that these are not the type of companies that usually bet on promising startups. They only invest in things that have already become infrastructure, things that their own customers have no choice but to depend on. So, their presence here tells us something about how the industry now sees Anthropic, and about where AI as a whole has arrived. In fact, a lot happened in AI last week. OpenAI also filed a confidential IPO prospectus with the SEC, targeting a September listing that analysts say could value the company at a trillion dollars. And SpaceX, which earlier this year completed a merger with Elon Musk's AI company XAI, publicly filed its own IPO prospectus with a Nasdaq listing expected this month itself.
These numbers and developments are extraordinary. But if you really think about it, it's been this way for at least two years now. AI companies growing and setting record after record is not new information. But what is new this time is what these events taken together actually signal. The companies that spent the last four years raising money to build the future are now cashing out into public markets. Meanwhile, the startups that were supposed to challenge them are being absorbed. And the data from inside the venture industry itself tells you a story that you will not get from press releases.
Capital in AI is concentrating so fast and into so few hands that the only question worth asking now is, is there anything meaningful left to fund even?
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host Snigdha Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Wednesday, the 3rd of June.
To understand how concentrated things have become, let's start with a number buried in KPMG's Venture Pulse Report from April this year. In the first quarter of this year, global venture capital investment roughly hit $330 billion, which is a record surpassing even the peak of the 2021 boom.
That figure gets reported as a sign of industry health, and in a narrow sense, it is accurate. But what it hides is that five US-based companies alone accounted for more than half of that total. OpenAI took $122 billion, Anthropic took $30 billion, and Elon Musk's ex-AI took $20 billion. The remaining roughly $160 billion was split across thousands of other deals globally, meaning the rest of the startup world was dividing up less than half of the pie.
A KPMG partner in fact put it quite plainly in the same report. They said, these big investments are really centered around a few companies, which suggests VC investors are putting money on companies that they expect to be winners, as opposed to putting those kinds of bets on smaller players. So in other words, what looks like a booming venture market underneath is actually a consolidation market, where capital is flowing towards the already powerful rather than backing the next challenger. The reason for that concentration is AI coding software, which has become the most valuable new software category in a generation. Anthropic launched Claude Code in early 2025, made it generally available by May and by late that year, after a major upgrade in November, it had gone viral among developers worldwide. My colleague Rachel did an episode on this, I will link it to the show notes, do give it a listen.
So by February this year, Claude Code had roughly crossed $2.5 billion in annualized revenue and this is according to CNBC. For context, we are talking about a product that did not even exist 18 months ago. Soon after, OpenAI 2 came up with its own coding tool called Codex, which crossed 5 million users by May. So basically, the AI coding market as of now, which barely existed 2 years ago, is already theirs. So when a product generates this kind of revenue, the character of the investment that follows also changes. For example, what Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix are doing by investing in Anthropic, is basically buying guaranteed access to a platform that their own customers already depend on. You could say this is the same calculation that led chip companies to invest in the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, TSMC. Or led Telcos to buy stakes in undersea cable operators decades ago. It is the logic of companies that cannot afford to be locked out of something critical, which means the technology has moved past the startup phase and into something closer to infrastructure.