Buy or Fade Away: Why Corporations Can’t Build Their Own AI

In partnership with

In the last 18 months, U.S.-based companies have collectively spent more than $100 billion acquiring AI, cybersecurity, and infrastructure startups. The pattern is clear: corporations can’t build cutting-edge AI internally—and they know it. They’re acquiring out of necessity.

We are in the midst of a structural shift in enterprise innovation strategy. Instead of investing in internal research and development, big companies are relying on corporate development teams to identify, acquire, and integrate startup-born innovation. This shift—let’s call it “Acquisition-as-R&D”—is accelerating across every layer of the tech stack.

💸 The Billion-Dollar Shopping List

Here’s a sample of the most significant tech acquisitions in 2024 and 2025:

These 19 transactions alone account for over $140 billion in deal value—and most were for startups with less than $2 billion in funding. This isn't just about market consolidation; it's about survival.

*Sorry had to update with one yesterday not reflected in all the numbers - Meta is paying almost $15B for 49% of Scale Ai. Zuck will not lose.

🔍 Why Corporates Can’t Build

1. Incentive Misalignment

Inside a large company, building disruptive technology means competing with legacy teams, budgets, and performance metrics. Why would a VP greenlight a project that cannibalizes their own headcount? Innovation loses out to inertia.

2. Talent Goes Where the Equity Is

The top AI researchers and engineers don’t want to work for legacy enterprises. They’re building the next Silo AI or Wiz. The best minds want ownership, speed, and mission—not bureaucracy and middle management.

3. Data Is Siloed and Infrastructure Is Obsolete

AI needs clean, cross-functional data to learn and improve. Most companies’ data is trapped in dozens of systems across business units. Startups start with a clean slate and a single purpose.

4. Public SaaS Multiples Have Compressed

HashiCorp, for example, IPOed at $81/share in 2021 and was acquired by IBM for $35/share—a 57% discount from its public valuation. This trend makes acquisitions financially appealing: corporates are getting mature products and teams at prices they’d never see in a bull market.

5. R&D Timelines Are Too Long

It takes years to develop scalable AI infrastructure. A company like AMD or Snowflake can acquire a proven solution in months and instantly plug it into their roadmap. Time-to-impact matters more than pride of authorship.

📊 What the Data Says

• According to PwC, deal volumes fell 17% in 2024, but total deal value grew 5%—meaning fewer, bigger, more strategic buys.

• EY reports that 59% of CEOs plan to pursue M&A in 2025 to accelerate digital transformation.

• Nearly 30% of all VC-backed startup exits in the last 12 months were acquisitions by other startups or late-stage tech companies, not traditional corporates.

• The average AI startup exit (>$100M) in 2024 delivered a 10× return on capital raised, according to PitchBook.

🧩 Sector Insights

Cybersecurity
Deals like Google’s acquisition of Wiz ($32B) and Thoma Bravo’s buyout of Darktrace ($5.3B) reflect an urgent scramble to secure the cloud stack. Enterprises realize they can’t afford to stitch together their own security tooling while AI-powered threats escalate.

AI Infrastructure
AMD’s $665M acquisition of Silo AI and Nvidia’s $700M acquisition of Run.ai underscore how crucial it is to own the foundation: GPU orchestration, inference optimization, and large-scale model management.

DevOps & Developer Tools
IBM’s $6.4B deal for HashiCorp and Snowflake’s $250M purchase of Crunchy Data signal a push to modernize enterprise workflows. From secrets management to open-source PostgreSQL, these tools are becoming core to enterprise agility.

Fintech & Platforms
Stripe acquiring Bridge for $1.1B and Robinhood acquiring Bitstamp for $200M show how even fintech giants are using M&A to expand into stablecoins, crypto, and new payment rails.

Today, corporate innovation isn’t built in an R&D lab. It’s negotiated by a corporate development team.

If you’re a founder building true infrastructure—whether in AI, cloud, data, or cybersecurity—understand this: you are the product strategy for tomorrow’s acquirer. You are what they can’t build.

The companies that survive the next wave won’t be the ones that build better, but the ones that buy smarter.

Find out why 1M+ professionals read Superhuman AI daily.

AI won't take over the world. People who know how to use AI will.

Here's how to stay ahead with AI:

1. Sign up for Superhuman AI. The AI newsletter read by 1M+ pros.

2. Master AI tools, tutorials, and news in just 3 minutes a day.

3. Become 10X more productive using AI.

Join 1 million pros and start learning AI