America’s leading artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI, may soon find themselves overtaken by faster, cheaper international competitors — particularly from China — according to legendary tech analyst and investor Mary Meeker.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Meeker, whose market insights have been a bellwether for Silicon Valley for decades, said AI is on track to generate unprecedented economic value — but warned that the spoils won’t be confined to North America.
“Multiple companies worth $10 trillion will be minted, and they probably will not all be based in North America,” she told the FT. “The wealth creation will be extraordinary. We have never had a five billion-user market that one could get to so easily.”
Meeker’s latest presentation — widely read by venture capitalists, technologists, and C-suite leaders — outlines mounting challenges for U.S.-based leaders such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. While these firms have dominated early development of large language models (LLMs), Meeker notes that soaring training costs, combined with a wave of leaner, more specialized alternatives, threaten to erode their early lead.
Among those challengers: China’s DeepSeek, which has made headlines by launching highly competitive LLMs at a fraction of the cost. “The business model is in flux,” Meeker’s report states, warning that the economics of general-purpose models increasingly resemble “commodity businesses with venture-scale burn.”
As training expenses skyrocket — with development costs for cutting-edge AI models up 2,400-fold over the past eight years — the path to profitability for even the top players has become narrow. OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic have reached a combined annualized revenue of $12 billion, but only after raising a staggering $95 billion in capital.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s valuation-to-revenue multiple “looks expensive,” according to Meeker’s analysis. Her comments come amid intensifying competition from both domestic start-ups building custom-trained, lightweight models and international players offering budget alternatives with growing capabilities.
A Financial Times chart included in the report compared U.S. and Chinese AI model performance between January 2024 and February 2025, showing how quickly Chinese platforms have closed the gap — particularly in areas such as cost efficiency and model speed.
At the same time, tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta have been pouring billions into AI infrastructure, with combined capital expenditures from the six largest U.S. tech companies surpassing $200 billion in 2024, according to Meeker. This gold rush has contributed to LLM firms reaching eye-popping valuations, with the “AI Big Three” of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI collectively worth an estimated $400 billion.
Meeker, once dubbed the “Queen of the Internet” for her foresight at Morgan Stanley in the 1990s, likened today’s AI investment climate to past tech upheavals. She compared the financial trajectory of AI firms to cash-intensive disruptors like Amazon, Uber, and Tesla, whose early losses were eventually rewarded with market dominance — but only after brutal shakeouts.
She also sounded a note of caution for investors caught up in the AI euphoria: “The rules that hold well in these times of euphoria are only invest what you’re willing to lose, and take a portfolio approach,” she told the Financial Times. “Putting all your eggs in one basket is a risk here, because everything is up and to the right — until it isn’t.”
With billions at stake, rising costs, and geopolitical rivalry heating up, Meeker’s warning is a sobering reminder that the race for AI supremacy may be only just beginning — and the winners may not look like the incumbents.
