Voice of AI: Who owns your AI? This week the answer has been postponed...

Ralph Schwehr
Jun 29
4 min read

For three years, Samsung had banned ChatGPT. This week, the company lifted the ban, handing OpenAI one of its biggest enterprise deals ever . But the real turning point lies deeper. While companies are still grappling with the best model, governments and hardware giants are suddenly fighting over something else, something far more significant: control. This week's question is no longer which AI is the smartest. It's who owns the underlying infrastructure.

Qualcomm is building the alternative to Nvidia

The biggest bombshell came from Qualcomm. The company is acquiring the infrastructure startup Modular , founded by LLVM creator Chris Lattner, for approximately $3.92 billion. Modular allows AI code to be written once and run across Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple Silicon, and Qualcomm chipsets without having to rewrite it for each chip . Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon openly calls it the antithesis to Nvidia's CUDA, the software lock-in that has chained the industry to a single vendor for almost two decades.

The market behind this is enormous. AI inference is projected to grow from $106 billion in 2025 to $255 billion by 2030. Those who break vendor dependency during this period will shift power dynamics, not just market share. For companies, this means that today's architectural decisions determine tomorrow's bargaining power.

Europe is drawing a red line

On June 3, the European Commission published the Cloud and AI Development Act. It defines four levels of sovereignty for cloud and AI services, which the public sector is to apply depending on the level of risk. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen justified the move in no uncertain terms, stating that Europe must not be dependent on the technologies that power hospitals and keep electricity grids stable. Her deputy, Henna Virkkunen, was even more explicit, stating that no provider of critical workloads should be allowed to have a kill switch.

The background explains the severity of the measure. US providers account for roughly 80 percent of professional cloud spending in the EU, and the European market share fell from 29 percent in 2017 to 15 percent in 2022. This is particularly significant for any company, as CADA could empower the Commission to require even private companies in regulated sectors such as banking, energy, and healthcare to conduct sovereignty risk assessments. Sovereignty would thus transform from a political buzzword into a concrete procurement requirement.

Samsung shows how introductions work today

Samsung's about-face is more than just a deal; it's a lesson in itself. Three years after a data leak in which engineers accidentally uploaded source code to the consumer version, the company is rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex on a large scale. The journey to get there, however, is what truly deserves attention. From April to May 2026, Samsung tested ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude in a two-month proof of concept with 2,500 employees before ultimately choosing OpenAI.

It wasn't hype that decided the outcome, but structured evidence. This very maturity is what separates successful implementations from costly failures. Those who introduce AI without assessing the current situation are buying into risk. Those who evaluate it according to clear criteria are buying into effectiveness.

Our AI Readiness Check provides fact-based transparency regarding your AI maturity level, offering comparable and actionable insights. Our Technology Due Diligence assesses the substance and digital sovereignty of AI investments before you commit any capital. Anyone who wants to gain control over their AI today starts with an honest assessment of their current status. https://www.oakai.de/leistungen

M&A: Few mega-deals, a clear pattern

The market is trembling. SpaceX is acquiring the coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, whose market share had previously fallen from 41 to 26 percent . ON Semiconductor is buying Synaptics for nearly $7 billion, the largest acquisition in the company's history, to advance into physical AI. A pattern underlies these individual deals, which PwC describes precisely: Capital is increasingly flowing through equity investments, joint ventures, and partnerships rather than traditional acquisitions.

So Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs founded a services company to help firms integrate Claude into their core processes. Their first target is the financial sector, and the reason is sobering. Around 60 percent of AI initiatives in finance fail. The gap between ambition and measurable impact remains the real battleground where competitiveness is decided.

Regulation is becoming a reality, even in the USA.

On June 30, the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act, the first comprehensive federal AI law in the US that actually takes effect, comes into force. It regulates high-risk systems involved in consequential decisions about employment, housing, healthcare, and financial services. Anyone operating globally will now have to navigate European, US state, and national law simultaneously. Compliance is no longer optional; it has become a business requirement.

Key findings: Competition is shifting from model performance to control over infrastructure and data; Europe's CADA is making cloud sovereignty a concrete procurement and compliance requirement; Samsung proves that structured evaluation beats hype in AI adoption; around 60 percent of AI initiatives in finance fail, the impact gap remains a key issue; with Colorado, AI regulation is becoming an operational reality in the USA as well

Conclusion

This week marks a shift that affects every decision-maker. Hardware is becoming vendor-agnostic, cloud is becoming sovereign, and adoption is becoming evidence-based. The crucial question is no longer which model you use. It's whether you can realistically assess your own AI landscape, evaluate its technological capabilities, and build it on a solid foundation.

This is precisely where we come in. The AI Readiness Check creates fact-based transparency about your AI maturity level, providing comparable and actionable insights. Our Technology Due Diligence assesses the substance and digital sovereignty of AI investments before you commit any capital. Anyone who wants to gain control over their AI today starts with an honest assessment of their current situation.

The future is not a matter of chance. It is a choice.

Sources

Qualcomm inks deal for AI startup Modular, CNBC, June 24, 2026
Cloud and AI Development Act, European Commission, 03.06.2026
Europe unveils tech sovereignty package, CNBC, June 3, 2026
AI to ROI: News & Analysis (Samsung), AI to ROI, June 26, 2026
SpaceX to acquire Cursor, CNBC, June 16, 2026
ON Semi strikes deal for Synaptics, CNBC, June 25, 2026
Global M&A mid-year outlook, PwC, June 2026
Top 10 AI News, unrot.co , June 26, 2026