The traditional Wall Street playbook prizes two things: make money, and make money in a way that sets you apart. Strong performance is table stakes; outperformance wins acclaim. Artificial intelligence is disrupting that formula because the scale of investment needed is driving rival firms to pool capital rather than seek unique, proprietary bets.
Large consortia and multi-billion dollar commitments
Nvidia’s roughly $500 billion consortium includes the four largest alternative-asset managers in the world and six of the top eight. In a similar vein, Blackstone and Apollo are jointly providing billions of dollars for Anthropic to purchase compute. Anthropic’s consulting offshoot, focused on deploying AI in the real world, raised $1.5 billion from Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic, Leonard Green, and Apollo. Nearly every major private-equity firm not on that list is backing OpenAI’s competing efforts. (Goldman Sachs, characteristically, is involved with both sides.)
This behavior departs from the usual Wall Street approach, which prioritizes skimming investment opportunities away from rivals rather than sharing them. When private-equity firms have previously combined forces on deals too large for any single participant, the results included some of the worst buyouts in history.
Why are firms clustering?
Part of the explanation is simply the sheer amount of capital required. “Why can you get five or six of the leading players at one table? Because there’s enough to go around,” Connor Teskey, chief executive of Brookfield Asset Management, told the author last week. Teskey expects winners and losers will still emerge as investors carve out niches within the AI market: Brookfield has bet on sovereign AI projects in Europe, Blue Owl positions itself as an AI landlord, and Apollo is willing to be a lender that takes on chip risk.
It is less clear, however, whether those are genuinely distinct strategic wagers or marketing labels for variations of the same big bet.
Groupthink risk and shared downside
AI investments are beginning to look like an “IBGYBG” trade — Wall Street shorthand that appeared in the US government’s postmortem on the 2008 subprime crash: “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.” If the strategy works, everyone shares in the gains and no single firm stands out as a genius; if it fails, losses are spread and no single participant appears uniquely foolish.
Ironically, the industry was just beginning to return to an environment where differentiated outperformance seemed possible again. Two decades of easy money had made many players look indistinguishably successful, and a more fractured, risky world of wars, inflation, and tariffs might have rewarded contrarian plays. Yet AI’s capital demands are steering the market back toward collective bets.
Infrastructure implications
The implications extend beyond software and models. A recent PwC study estimates global spending on data centers alone could top $30 trillion through 2050 — a buildout that PwC says would surpass previous infrastructure booms such as railroads, the internet, and electrification.
Conclusion
AI’s scale is forcing unusual cooperation among Wall Street’s traditionally competitive firms. Whether those partnerships represent genuinely diverse strategic positions or essentially the same large bet repackaged remains uncertain; ultimately, the industrywide outcome will determine which firms emerge as winners or losers.
