Will One Company Own the Full AI Stack?
Satya Nadella says one company owning the model, the app tier, and the silicon is unlikely. He says there will be, who knows, five or six closed models all competing and maybe five or six open weight models all competing.
An agentic system can use a router with a decision engine and send each task to the best model. Nadella once thought one vertically integrated winner might take the model, the app tier, and the system down to the silicon. He now sees the other direction. More competition shows up in silicon, in the systems that manage the silicon, in the model layer, and in the app layer.
He calls that a healthy direction of travel. The result still depends on what becomes the dominant design. His hope is horizontal specialization, with multiple winners in each layer and the ability for people to compose.
