Big Tech is eating as much data as it can to win in AI — but it’s not ‘winner takes all,’ CEO says
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Big technology companies are consuming as much data as possible to become winners in artificial intelligence — but that’s not necessarily what will define winners, according to the boss of software giant Appian.
Matt Calkins, CEO and co-founder of Appian, said that though internet giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are spending billions on the tech, ensuring success in AI is “not just about money.”
“AI is not a place where money makes more money,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview at its London bureau on Tuesday.
Calkins was referring to the high-profile deals companies like Microsoft and Amazon are agreeing with ambitious and fast-growing foundational AI model makers, like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, a deal that entails Microsoft getting a stake in OpenAI and the latter adding its GPT language models to the Redmond, Washington-based technology giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.
Microsoft has struck a similar deal with Mistral, taking a 15 million euro ($16 million) stake in the French AI firm.
In OpenAI’s case, Microsoft has a non-voting observer sitting on the firm’s board.
That happened after a shocking series of events last year that saw the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, temporarily ousted, before later returning after hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened a coup to join Altman at Microsoft.
Separately, Amazon has invested a whopping $4 billion into U.S. AI firm Anthropic, which is behind the Claude AI system. Amazon holds a minority stake in Anthropic but no board seat.
Google, too, has committed billions of funding to Anthropic, agreeing last year to invest up to $2 billion.
Scrutiny from UK regulators
British regulators are assessing whether deals agreed by Microsoft and Amazon with foundation AI model startups may constitute effective mergers that could lead to a substantial reduction of competition.
Microsoft denies its deal with OpenAI and Mistral and hiring from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon says its partnership with Anthropic constitutes a limited corporate investment, not a merger.
This is a market for the clever. The fact that you’ve got enough money to buy, or buy a piece of, Anthropic or Mistral or any of that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner take all’ market.
Matt Calkins
CEO, Appian
For Calkins, whether or not those deals qualify as mergers that threaten competition in AI, there will be room for innovators to thrive.
“If coalitions won the AI race, Google would have won by now,” he said, calling out the U.S. tech giant’s $500 million takeover of British AI lab DeepMind.
Far from it, Calkins argues — instead, he thinks Google lost out to Microsoft early on when it comes to generative AI, which threatens to upend the fabric of Google’s search business.
It follows a blunder that saw Google’s Gemini text-to-image generator produce inaccuracies in historical pictures that went viral online. Google paused image generation of people to refine the tool. CEO Sundar Pichai called the debacle “unacceptable,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC in February.
Google was not immediately available for comment and contacted by CNBC.
“This is a market for the clever,” Calkins said. “The fact that you’ve got enough money to buy, or buy a piece of, Anthropic or Mistral or any of that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner take all’ market.”
“There’s going to be different AI algorithms for different purposes, and they are going to be much more or less valuable, depending on whether and how you’ve loaded your own data into it,” he added.
Calkins said that the only way for AI systems to become truly clever and useful is by being capable of understanding what we want from them for use in our everyday lives.
“The best AI will be the AI you put your data into, not whoever bought the biggest stack,” he said.
Europe has ‘head start’ with regulation
Calkins said the AI race today has become more about “how much data can you eat” than how smart the AI actually is.
Big Tech companies have been “doing anything they can in order to get the most data,” Calkins said. “But that game was almost up,” he added.
That’s because, absent any concrete laws to prevent Big Tech’s guzzling up of data to prevent privacy infringements, those companies were allowed to obtain the data they needed to train their models.
Calkins said he’s disappointed with a lack of progress on regulation of AI in the U.S. at a federal level.
Europe has a “head start” on AI in a way “because there’s emerging clarity on regulation,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Tuesday.
“In the United States, it’s not clear, partly because the government has been a little bit too friendly to Big Tech,” he said.
The European Union officially approved its AI Act, the first comprehensive law governing artificial intelligence, in March.
Calkins said businesses need clarity on how they can use AI safely and guarantee things like protection of intellectual property and users’ personal privacy
“In Europe there’s a natural skepticism … over here, we have regulations that push back against American Big Tech firms,” Calkins said.
“I would suggest it’s time for that again, with fair use of copyrighted information. We need a clear playing field, we need to understand what data we’re allowed to use.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
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Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.
WATCH: Why President Trump can’t make companies pump more oil
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, appears at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on May 9, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Design software company Figma filed for an IPO on Tuesday, and plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol “FIG.”
The offering would be one of the hotly anticipated IPOs in recent years given Figma’s growth rate and its high private market valuation. In late 2023, a $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped due to regulatory concerns in the U.K. That led Adobe to pay Figma a $1 billion termination fee.
Revenue in the first quarter increased 46% to $228.2 million from $156.2 million in the same period a year ago, according to Figma’s prospectus. The company recorded a net income of $44.9 million, compared to $13.5 million a year earlier.
As of March 31, Figma had around 450,000 customers. Of those, 1,031 were contributing at least $100,000 a year to annual revenue, up 47% from a year earlier. Clients include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Netflix. More than half of revenue comes from outside the U.S.
Figma didn’t say how many shares it plans to sell in the IPO. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer last year, and in April it announced that it had confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC.
Wall Street banks predicted a rush of IPOs after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November following a dry spell dating back to late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. While President Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs in April roiled markets and led a number of companies to delay their plans, activity has been picking up of late.
Stablecoin issuer Circle doubled in value in its early June debut and is now up more than sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of almost $43 billion. Online banking company Chime also debuted in June, following Hinge Health’s IPO in May. Artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in March, jumped 46% in June and has quadrupled since its offering.
Buy now, pay later company Klarna, based in the U.K., filed for a U.S. IPO in March, as did ticket marketplace StubHub.
Figma was founded in 2012 by CEO Dylan Field, 33, and Evan Wallace, and is based in San Francisco. The company had 1,646 employees as of March 31.
Before establishing Figma, Field spent over two years at Brown University, where he met Wallace. Field then took a Thiel Fellowship “to pursue entrepreneurial projects,” according to the filing. The two-year program that Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel established in 2011 gives young entrepreneurs a $200,000 grant along with support from founders and investors, according to an online description.
Field is the biggest individual owner of Figma, with 56.6 million Class B shares and 51.1% of voting power ahead of the IPO. He said in a letter to investors that it was time for Figma to buck the “trend of many amazing companies staying privately indefinitely.”
Databricks, SpaceX and Stripe are among high-valued companies that are still private.
“Some of the obvious benefits such as good corporate hygiene, brand awareness, liquidity, stronger currency and access to capital markets apply,” he wrote, explaining the decision. “More importantly, I like the idea of our community sharing in the ownership of Figma — and the best way to accomplish this is through public markets.”
Field added that as a public company, investors should “expect us to take big swings,” including through acquisitions. In April Figma bought the assets and team of an unnamed technology company for $14 million, according to the filing.
The IPO will also mark another much-needed win for Silicon Valley venture firms, which are in need of returns after the multi-year slump. Index Ventures is the largest outside shareholder, with a 17% stake before the offering, according to the filing. Greylock owns 16%, Kleiner Perkins controls 14% and Sequoia has a stake of 8.7%.
Figma said it faces “intense competition” and that loss of market share would “adversely affect our business,” but didn’t name any specific competitors.
Over 13 million people use Figma per month, and only one-third of them are designers, according to the filing. In March the company announced Figma Sites, a tool that turns designs into working websites. It’s one of a few new products that diversify the company away from its collaborative service for crafting app and website designs.
As of March 31, Figma had $1.54 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.
Using its cash, Figma has begun investing in digital currencies. In 2024, Figma’s board authorized a $55 million investment into a Bitwise Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. As of March 31, the holding was worth $69.5 million, according to the filing. In May, the board approved a $30 million investment in Bitcoin, and Figma spent the money on USD Coin, which is a stablecoin.
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are leading the deal along with Allen and Co. and JPMorgan Chase.
Correction: A prior version of this story had the incorrect stock exchange in the headline.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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