Re:OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 so it can co...
by vl on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @01:21PM
(#46060671)
EC2 and S3 moat comes from extreme economies of scale. Only Google and Microsoft can compete. You would never be able to achieve S3 profitability because you are not going to get same hardware deals, same peering agreements, same data center optimization advantages. On top of that there is extremely optimized software stack (S3 runs at ~98% utilization, capacity deployed just couple weeks in advance, i.e. if they don’t install new storage, they will run out of capacity in a month).
Re:OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 so it can co...
by bloppe on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @01:25PM
(#46060720)
I wouldn't call it a moat. A moat is more about switching costs rather than quality differentiation. You have a moat when your customers don't want to switch to a competitor despite that competitor having a superior product at a better price.
Re:OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 so it can co...
by mystifyingpoi on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @02:13PM
(#46061246)
> S3 runs at ~98% utilization
I'm geniuinely curious, source?
If AWS' was still just EC2, and S3 then I would argue they had very little moat indeed.
Now, when it comes to Generative AI models, we will need to see where the dust settles. But open-weight alternatives have shown that you can get a decent level of performance on consumer grade hardware.
Training AI is absolutely a task that needs deep pockets, and heavy scale. If we settle into a world where improvements are iterative, the tooling is largely interoperable... Then OpenAI are going to have to start finding ways of making money that are not providing API access to a model. They will have to build a moat. And that moat may well be a deep set of integrations, and an ecosystem that makes moving away hard, as it arguably is with the cloud.