My colleague Ben Bergman rubbed shoulders with world leaders, tech gurus, and venture capitalists in Davos this week.
There’s nothing better than being in the room where it happens. I asked Ben what he saw and heard. Here are his highlights:
Q: What was the biggest tech thing that was talked about at Davos this year?
It’s hard to compete with President Trump and Greenland, but aside from that, AI was what everyone was talking about.
There was a lot of discussion about when businesses will start to see productivity gains that justify their huge AI spend and whether we are in a bubble.
Q: What tech discussion/theme surprised you at Davos?
Walking down the main thoroughfare in Davos is always a highlight because all the shops that are open the rest of the year are taken over this week by companies that host “houses” to showcase their brands and host clients and events.
It is interesting to see who’s here and who’s not.
Davos is not a tech conference, and I’ve usually thought of it as being more dominated by finance and blue-chip companies.
Walking along the street this year, 80% of the houses were tech. Palantir and Meta (with its free hot chocolate stand) had the most visible presence. Amazon’s house was surprisingly small. Google was far away from the main action. Lightspeed was the only venture capital firm I saw, with its odd retro “Lighthouse.”
It is also interesting to see who was not here. OpenAI has no house, and Sam Altman did not come, though some executives are here. Elon Musk was not originally part of the program but was a last-minute addition on Thursday.
Q: What was the tone of the tech executives and tech investors there?
If executives and investors are worried about the future, they did not share that with me or on stage.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang described what is happening with AI as “the largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” and not only that, but said it will drive job creation across the global economy.
Q: What was the biggest concern expressed by tech executives and tech investors at Davos this year?
While optimism ruled the week, the fear of being in an AI bubble was on everyone’s mind.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned onstage Tuesday that there would be a bubble if the only companies using AI are other AI companies.
“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,” Nadella said.
Huang cited the rising rental price of computer chips as evidence that we are not in a bubble.
“If you try to rent an Nvidia GPU these days, it’s so incredibly hard, and the spot price of GPU rentals is going up, not just the latest generation, but two-generation-old GPUs,” he said.
Another concern from tech executives I spoke to was how hard it is to hire and retain top talent right now, especially as big AI labs spend like drunken sailors to hire.
“It’s astronomical amounts of money at the big level,” Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of Harvey, told me. He said he spends 70% of his time on hiring.
“I’m super involved, and I think it’s the most important thing at our company right now, Weinberg said.
Q: Anything else tech folks should know from your time there?
There were so many techies here that sometimes I felt like I was in San Francisco.
I asked a couple of startup founders why they came so far to be here, and the consensus was that there’s nothing like Davos for the efficiency of meeting potential customers and investors who are all packed into a tiny Swiss village for the week.
Waiting in the cold in a long line for a party for General Catalyst and Lightspeed, I asked one founder why he traveled here.
He told me Alexandr Wang, founder and former CEO of Scale AI, who is now chief AI officer at Meta, advised him Davos was highly useful because Wang last year said he signed almost a third of Scale’s customers in the short time he was here.
Weinberg told me that dealmaking started even before I arrived, with many transactions happening in the business-class sections of flights to Zurich from San Francisco and New York.
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