"In 2018, my brother and I sat in a product review at Snap's Santa Monica offices staring at a chart we'd grown too familiar with. Our daily active users had stalled. Instagram (which had launched a near-identical version of our core Stories feature two years earlier) was accelerating. Snap had built a genuinely better product. It had a loyal, passionate user base. It had once famously turned down $3 billion from Facebook when most people would have taken the money and left. None of it was enough."
"Meta controlled the layer beneath Snap: the social graph, the feed, the audience. Once you own that layer, everything built on top bends toward you.We've spent more than two decades in tech. We've learned to recognize when a pattern repeats. In social networks, concentration formed at the platform level. Distribution, data, and audiences clustered around whoever had the most users, and everything else followed with them."
"Today, two of the largest social platforms on earth (Facebook and Instagram) belong to the same company. The cloud infrastructure that powered them followed the same logic: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now control roughly 63% of global cloud capacity. AI is following the same geometry, only faster. One Level Deeper You could always spin up a new social platform. TikTok proved it possible."
"In AI, you cannot build anything without compute: the GPUs, the data centers, the raw processing capacity that determines who gets to participate in this economy at all. Access to compute has become a prerequisite for existence, not just for scale. A startup without cloud contracts cannot train. A country without chip access cannot compete. The gate is already in place. The numbers describe how closed that gate already is. NVIDIA holds 85% of the data center GPU market."
Daily active users stalled while Instagram accelerated after launching a similar Stories feature. Snap had a better product, a loyal user base, and previously declined major acquisition offers, yet still lost momentum. Meta controlled the underlying social layer, including the graph, feed, and audience, causing products built on top to bend toward it. Concentration historically formed at the platform level, with distribution, data, and audiences clustering around the largest user bases. Cloud infrastructure follows the same pattern, with major providers controlling most global capacity. AI follows similar geometry because compute access is required to train models, and GPU and cloud dominance already restrict participation.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]