There was a moment at the World Economic Forum meeting this week when Davos appeared to be a cutting-edge technology conference, with an appearance on stage by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadellaand even more industry executives.
The big topic, unsurprisingly, was AI, with CEOs offering visions for the technology’s transformative potential while also acknowledging ongoing concerns that it’s inflating a huge bubble. In the midst of those big-picture predictions, he also finds time to take swipes at his rivals, and even at his actual partners.
In the latest episode of The TechCrunch Equity PodcastI discussed all that Davos with TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec and Sean O’Kane.
Kirsten noted that the conference seemed to have changed from previous years, with tech companies like Meta and Salesforce taking over the main promenade, while important topics like climate change failed to attract large crowds. And Sean says that even AI executives don’t bearable “panhandling for use and more customers,” might sound like that.
Read a preview of our full conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Kirsten: Some discussions around, let’s say, climate change or poverty and big global issues, (don’t) attract a lot of people. Meanwhile, on the main promenade in Davos, Switzerland, some of the largest storefronts have been converted and taken over by companies like Meta and Salesforce, Tata, as well as many Middle Eastern countries. And I think the biggest one is House USA, sponsored by McKinsey and Microsoft. It really felt visually different.
And then Elon Musk is there – Sean, you and I are both listening. There isn’t much there, but I will say that he looks interesting, given that he avoided Davos before.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
Anthony: We tried to pull the technology content of Davos, (and) there are really things to highlight here, but it’s also interesting, especially since AI has become a big business story, it’s very difficult to separate it from all the other threads about the bigger questions about international trade, about world politics.
One of the big headlines coming out of (Davos), at least, is that said by the CEO of Anthropicwhere he basically attacked the Trump administration’s decision to allow Nvidia to sending chips to China. It’s a technology story, but it’s also a trade story, it’s a political story.
I think in terms of the essence of what he said, it felt consistent to me in the sense that he was generally comfortable taking his mouth off, and also this interesting line (in the discourse of AI) where there is an element of criticism, but also the relationship to this really powerful AI hype. One of the phrases used is that AI data centers are like countries full of genius. I had a question about that – but he was like, “How can we send all these chips to China if we’re worried about China? Because we’re actually sending a country full of geniuses to China and letting them control it.”
Sean: You could probably fill a notebook with all the weird phrases CEOs are using this week. Another thing that has stuck in my mind is that Satya Nadella keeps calling data center token factories, which is a good abstraction of what he thinks they exist.
You know, there were two things that really stuck out to me about all the different things that these CEOs said at different parts of the week. One of them is definitely all sorts of sniping at each other – not only Anthropic with Nvidia, which is interesting in itself, because Anthropic is a huge customer of Nvidia and uses Nvidia GPUs, and there is an interesting tension there. But also just seeing them sitting next to each other and really kind of pulling, you know, putting the blade out a little bit more than we’re used to seeing.
We know that they are all jockeying for the lead and they are also trying to continue their talent without overspending themselves off. And this is one of the first times that the tension is palpable and workable. Both are not often true at the same time.
The other thing, for you on a lot of that geopolitics and business — that’s the most revealing thing that I think we’ve gotten that CEO on the record about what he thinks he needs to continue to be successful.
Satya Nadella – I think you can read it this way, but I don’t think it’s bad – it’s more or less like, “More people use this or it’s going to be a bubble and a bubble that pops.” He takes a different position in some ways from Dario Amadei of Anthropic, because Nadella’s focus is really about trying to use it widely (and) how to make AI not unfair in all the different communities and around the world, instead of concentrating in one place, like only the rich place, which I think is an interesting tension. But there are elements that give away the game is not indeed panhandling for use and more customers … but kind.
And until recently, Jensen Huang of Nvidia did the same thing, where he said, “We are not investing enough in this and we need more investment in order to do this work.”
Kirsten: Jensen’s comment is interesting because he is really talking about building a project, and one can offer a counterpoint, there will be a moment when construction is slow, but no one is talking about it now.
On the other hand, I think there is a good point made, which we have never really seen people all sort together in the room sniping at each other. Often you will have the likes of Sam Altman at a conference or Satya (Nadella), but here they are all together. So you hear it in real time.