Microsoft’s 50th year could be its most pivotal to date
In 2025, Microsoft’s massive AI investments and partnership with OpenAI face a significant test as the tech giant doubles down on future growth.
There is a sign perched on the bookshelf in Microsoft VP of AI Eric Boyd’s home office. “I have not been asked for GPUs in __ days,” it reads, with the blank space theoretically replaced by a new number each day. On the day Boyd spoke to Capital Brief, the number was zero.
“I had that sign made a few years ago,” he said. “It was funny then, and is still kind of relevant.”
There is no “kind of” about it. Artificial intelligence was already an arms race before 2024, but it escalated dramatically last year. Elon Musk’s xAI raised over USD12 billion and built the largest GPU cluster in the world — a title recently challenged by Amazon, which announced it would back Anthropic with tens of thousands of AWS’ proprietary silicon chips.
Yet the tidal wave of capital expenditure on AI infrastructure comes at a time when many in the industry say the technology is hitting a wall. That includes OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who has since left to start his own venture, and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun. Both argue that the methods used to drive AI advancements over the past decade are yielding diminishing returns.
