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RESEARCH HUB

AI Wars 2025

Hardware, Software & Geopolitics

Overview
Oct 2025 12 Min Read --

Executive Briefing: The Kinetic Phase

The AI landscape has shifted from experimental research to industrial-scale deployment. Today's conflict is about Memory + Agents (Software), Power Availability (Hardware), and Energy-Backed Sovereignty (National Security). Gemini 3.0 has rewritten the model layer, while compute now matters less than megawatts.

Hardware Leader
Nvidia 88% Share

Blackwell chips sold out through 2025.

Top Model (Elo)
Gemini / Claude Tie

Multimodal reasoning capabilities peaking.

Open Source Star
Llama 3.X Meta

Defining the standard for local deployment.

China's Contender
DeepSeek MoE Arch

Leading cost-efficiency innovations.

Market Cap Impact: The "AI Premium"

Strategic Alerts

GEMINI 3.0 Now Live

“Mobius” ships with infinite context + active memory. Enterprise RAG vendors are in retreat.

CLAUDE 4.5 Engineers

Sonnet becomes default coding copilot for regulated industries; zero-hallucination marketing sticks.

POWER WALL Gigawatt Era

Stargate evolves into a gigawatt utility build; SMRs become mandatory for future AI campuses.

Hardware Wars: The Silicon Curtain

The chip shortage is over; the power shortage begins. Hyperscalers are measured in gigawatts, Rubin-class GPUs optimize FLOPs per watt, and every new campus ships with liquid cooling and a nuclear LOI.

Data Center GPU Share (2024)

Est. Unit Volume
Nvidia's CUDA moat remains the primary barrier to entry for AMD (MI300) and Intel (Gaudi).

The Rise of Custom Silicon

Company Chip Name Purpose Threat Level
Google TPU v5p / Axion Training & Inference High
AWS Trainium2 / Inferentia Cloud Efficiency Medium
Microsoft Maia 100 Azure Optimization Medium
Meta MTIA Recommendation/Ranking Low (Niche)

The Chokepoints

NLD
Lithography
ASML (Netherlands)
100% Monopoly on EUV
TWN
Fabrication
TSMC (Taiwan)
90% of Advanced Chips
KOR
Memory (HBM)
SK Hynix / Samsung
Critical bottleneck
USA
Design + Power
Nvidia / Amazon / Google
Rubin GPUs + SMR build-outs

Software Wars: The Brains

Gemini 3.0 “Mobius” shifted the battlefield from IQ to memory. Google now sells “infinite context” + live project recall. Claude 4.5 Sonnet owns reliability, while OpenAI’s Orion (GPT-5) stalls under energy constraints and pivots to leaner O-series reasoning agents.

Model Capability Frontier

Comparing normalized benchmark scores (MMLU, HumanEval, Math).

The "Big Three" Ecosystems

Google Gemini 3.0

Infinite Context

Massive context window (1M+ tokens). Deep integration with Workspace ecosystem.

Anthropic Claude 4.5

Safety & Coding

Engineers' default copilot—most reliable for production code and regulated industries.

OpenAI GPT-5o

O-Series Agents

Leading the "Agentic" future with advanced reasoning and voice interaction.

The Open Source Wildcard

Meta's Llama 3 strategy is "Scorched Earth." By releasing state-of-the-art models for free, Zuckerberg aims to commoditize the model layer, hurting the margins of OpenAI and Google while keeping Meta's core ad business safe.

Geopolitics: The Bifurcation

Export controls created a split stack, not a ceiling. China now operates a fully de-Americanized pipeline—Huawei’s Ascend 920 silicon, CANN software, and MoE-first models (DeepSeek V3, Qwen 2.5-Max) tuned for efficiency over brute force.

China's AI Ecosystem Map

Bubble Size = Estimated Parameter Count / Influence. X-Axis = Focus (Consumer vs Enterprise).

Key Players (China)

DeepSeek (V3)

MoE-first design delivers GPT-4 level reasoning at a fraction of the energy. Dominates open-source benchmarks.

Alibaba (Qwen)

Qwen 2.5-Max powers China’s sovereign clouds—CUDA-free, running entirely on Huawei Ascend hardware.

Huawei (Ascend 920)

5nm indigenous silicon roughly equivalent to Nvidia H100. It’s not better, but it’s sovereign and shipping.

Financial Flows: Follow the Money

Follow the power curve. CAPEX is a proxy for national energy strategy: Microsoft + OpenAI are effectively building utilities (Stargate), Google and Amazon are acquiring SMR vendors, and sovereign clouds are the new defense budget line item.

Performance Index (2 Year)

Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) Forecast

Microsoft + OpenAI
$100B (Stargate Project)
Google
$50B (Annual Rate)
Meta
$35B (GPU Hoarding)
"The risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing." - Sundar Pichai, Google CEO

The Winner

Pick-and-Shovel

Hardware & Infrastructure providers (Nvidia, Vertiv, TSMC) capture 90% of current profits.

The Question Mark

Application Layer

SaaS companies are struggling to prove AI features can drive new revenue, not just retention.

The Next Wave

Agentic Sovereignty

Saudi (G42), France (Mistral), and Japan are funding sovereign clouds + agentic interface layers so their data never touches US servers.

Strategic Outlook: The Agent Web

“Dead Internet” isn’t a meme anymore—Gemini 3.0 agents negotiate with GPT-5 prototypes, transact on markets, and book logistics without humans in the loop. The next control point is the interface layer: whoever owns the agents that talk to other agents owns the user. Energy futures (Uranium/Nat Gas) and agent orchestration platforms are the sharpest trades.