Eight words from billionaire Mark Cuban are shaking up the AI world.

(Dan Tri Newspaper) - The trillion-dollar AI race is hotter than ever. While Big Tech is pouring money into gaining the upper hand, Mark Cuban has unleashed an eight-word "devastating blow," revealing a new rule: Whoever controls the IP wins.

Báo Dân trí•24/07/2025

The artificial intelligence (AI) race is no longer a sprint but has transformed into a global geopolitical arms race. What was once an open and highly academic field is now becoming a brutal, secretive, and extremely costly game.

Against this backdrop, Mark Cuban's statement was like a ticking time bomb, forcing the entire tech world to re-evaluate its strategies.

The trillion-dollar AI race

The world is witnessing an unprecedented wave of spending from tech giants. They are not only entering the AI game but are also betting their future on it.

The four giants Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, and Meta have committed an astonishing amount: over $320 billion to AI infrastructure this year alone. To put this into perspective, that's larger than the GDP of many countries. The majority of this massive investment is going into building megadata centers and upgrading processing power for next-generation AI models.

The reason behind this is simple. In the world of AI, power is measured by the number of chips and the amount of data. Whoever has more will be more powerful.

Microsoft, through its strategic partnership with OpenAI, quickly gained access to the most advanced language modeling technologies. Not stopping there, they announced plans to spend $80 billion this year building data centers for AI training and deployment on the Azure cloud platform.

Not to be outdone, Google has invested approximately $75 billion in AI and recently announced plans to spend an additional $25 billion to expand its data center network. Their trump card is the 7th generation TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) chip, specifically designed to handle deeper and more complex neural networks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) also develops its own chips called Trainium and Inferentia, aiming to optimize costs and performance for businesses deploying AI on its platform.

This craze has transformed Nvidia into an empire. From a graphics card manufacturer, Nvidia has become the ultimate weapons provider in the AI war, with a market capitalization exceeding $4 trillion, a figure unimaginable just a few years ago.

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Major tech corporations are locked in a fierce race for AI leadership, pouring tens of billions of dollars into infrastructure and offering incredibly lucrative compensation packages to attract talent (Photo: FT).

If hardware is the "muscle," then talent is the "brain" of AI. And the battle for the best minds is unfolding at an unprecedented speed and intensity.

Compensation and benefits packages have far exceeded conventional limits. According to reliable sources, top AI experts at Meta can receive compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years, with first-year earnings exceeding $100 million. A prime example is Ruoming Pang, a former Apple executive, who is believed to have joined Meta's "Superintelligence" team with a $200 million contract.

Average salaries are also sky-high. An AI researcher at Microsoft can earn around $431,000 per year, while some research scientists at Nvidia receive salaries exceeding $600,000 per year. This is many times higher than the salary of a senior software engineer – one of the highest-paying professions in Silicon Valley.

Companies are spending huge sums of money to poach talent from competitors, shaking up the entire tech job market. This is no longer recruitment; it's a true "talent poaching" campaign.

Mark Cuban's "Truth Bomb": IP is King

While investors were intoxicated by growth figures and companies were busy "burning money," billionaire investor Mark Cuban, with the keen insight of someone always ahead of his time, issued a concise yet powerful warning that amounted to a new law.

On social media platform X, he declared: "IP is king in an AI world." These eight words are not just an assertion, but a prophecy about the next phase in the AI war.

Cuban further clarified: “In my opinion, what many people haven’t realized is that no company willing to spend over $1 trillion would accept being left out of the game. They will do everything they can to gain dominance. I don’t know exactly what they will do, but I guess things will get very fierce.”

According to him, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on hardware and talent is just the beginning. In the next phase, the giants will spend even more enormous sums to "lock down" the intellectual property (IP) that they consider core. The era of fortified walls, deep moats, and closed ecosystems is coming. The goal is not just to win, but to monopolize.

Cuban's warning sounded the death knell for the "publish or perish" culture that had dominated academia and technology research for decades.

“The era of ‘announce or disappear’ is probably over,” Cuban observed. “Now it’s ‘the more you announce, the more valuable it becomes’ because current platform models will instantly swallow everything you share.”

Any research, code snippet, or dataset that is made public can be instantly "absorbed" by competitor AI models, eroding the competitive advantage of its creator. Therefore, Mark Cuban's advice to AI creators, researchers, and engineers is equally chilling: "Enclose your work, keep the code in a private repository, or put it behind a fee wall."

This shift in mindset is revolutionary. Openness and knowledge sharing, once the driving force behind AI development, could now become a fatal weakness.

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Billionaire investor Mark Cuban believes that in the increasingly fierce AI race, the company that controls talent and owns intellectual property will win (Photo: Getty).

A guide for investors in the new era.

This strategic shift has profound consequences for the stock market and investors. The pressure to generate returns from massive investments is growing. If these investments cannot be successfully commercialized, today's impressive spending figures will become huge "red ink stains" on tomorrow's books.

Through Mark Cuban's lens, the investment landscape in AI becomes clearer:

Seek out "IP fortresses": Instead of just looking at the biggest spenders, look for businesses that possess solid patent portfolios, proprietary datasets that cannot be replicated, and rare strategic partnerships. Nvidia is a prime example of the success of this strategy.

Investing in "weapons" and "infrastructure": Companies providing tools and platforms for the AI race, such as Nvidia (chips) and major cloud service providers, will continue to benefit regardless of who ultimately wins the modeling battle.

Diversification to mitigate risk: If you don't want to bet everything on one "warhorse," AI-focused ETFs are a smart choice. They offer a diversified basket of stocks, helping to mitigate risk if a particular company falters in the race.

Ultimately, Mark Cuban's message is a stark warning. The AI war has entered a new, more brutal and unforgiving phase. In this trillion-dollar game, victory will not belong to the one with the smartest algorithm, but to the one who possesses the "keys" to the kingdom—intellectual property.

"Times are changing," and those who fail to adapt will be left behind.

Source: https://dantri.com.vn/kinh-doanh/8-tu-cua-ty-phu-mark-cuban-khien-gioi-ai-chao-dao-20250723215606456.htm