TechCrunch Analysis: The Haves and Have Nots of the AI Gold Rush — Wealth Concentration Reaches Extreme Levels

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TechCrunch reports the AI wealth divide is the worst ever seen, with roughly 10,000 people at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, NVIDIA, and Meta hitting retirement wealth above $20M over five years. Three critical resources — compute (training clusters costing hundreds of millions), talent (transformer/distributed training experts), and capital — are concentrating in fewer hands. The have-nots are pivoting to vertical AI solutions where domain expertise outweighs model size, or betting on open-source models.