OpenAI Eats Startups Building on Top of It
Wrappers get eaten, infra gets integrated, and orchestration is the prize
OpenAI is no longer just building the future of intelligence. It’s trying to own the map.
The company’s recent moves, including eating wrapper apps, laying down datacenters, and launching GPT‑4o, aren’t random. They’re part of a coherent, imperial strategy: dominate the decision layer of AI. Not just own the models. Not just own the infrastructure. But orchestrate the entire system.
This isn’t vertical integration in the old sense. It’s something more aggressive, more modern. OpenAI is positioning itself at the junction where every AI request gets resolved: what model gets called, what GPU runs it, which latency and memory settings apply. Whoever controls that layer doesn’t need to own every part of the stack. They just need to be the gravity well around which the stack revolves.
The Stack Under Pressure
The AI ecosystem splits into three functional layers: infrastructure (hardware, datacenters, energy), models (the cognitive substrate), and applications (agents, copilots, UX wrappers). Each obeys a different economic logic under pressure from frontier models:
Application Layer: Zero-sum. The better the model, the less you need the app.
Model Layer: Expansionist. Absorbs adjacent functionality and eats its children.
Infrastructure Layer: Scarce. Constrained by physics, capex, and geography.
OpenAI is pushing in both directions—up into apps, down into infra—but these extensions serve a deeper goal: to control orchestration.
App-Layer Wrappers Are Getting Vaporized
The app layer is crumbling under model gravity. Jasper, Copy.ai, and other prompt-packaging startups are fading. Notion AI no longer differentiates. GPT-4o has made entire categories of voice agents and productivity copilots redundant. This isn’t just competitive pressure. It’s structural collapse.
Why? Because most apps were never companies. They were transient UI veneers on top of OpenAI’s own API. Once the model improves, the need for the intermediary vanishes. What was once a product becomes a prompt.
If your app lives too close to the model, it gets eaten. This is not a temporary trend. It’s the logical endpoint of interface deflation. As models become more fluent, they commoditize everything that sits atop them.
Infrastructure Can’t Be Eaten, So OpenAI Is Buying It
The infra layer is a different beast. You can’t out-prompt a transformer substation. You can’t abstract away latency, land use, or thermal limits. Infrastructure is slow, hard, and capital-intensive. But it’s also strategic.
OpenAI’s Stargate project, a multi-billion-dollar push to build AI-dedicated datacenters, is not about replicating AWS. It’s about leverage: securing capacity, hedging against Microsoft, signaling industrial seriousness. OpenAI doesn’t need to own all the compute in the world. It just needs enough to dictate the terms of engagement.
Stargate isn’t about scale. It’s about control.
This Is the Playbook of Empires
There’s nothing new about this move. It echoes the strategies of industrial empires past.
Standard Oil didn’t just extract. It controlled wells, railroads, refineries, and storefronts.
AT&T didn’t just offer calls. It owned the lines, the phones, the switches, the labs.
Luxottica doesn’t just sell glasses. It designs them, manufactures them, retails them, and insures your eye exam.
These companies understood a critical truth: the power lies in the interface. If you can intermediate flows—of oil, of voice, of vision—you don’t need to own everything. You just need to own the point where everything resolves.
That’s what OpenAI is doing now.
Orchestration Is the Real Prize
Owning apps is zero-sum. Owning infrastructure is expensive. But owning orchestration? That’s leverage without weight.
Think of it as API-level empire. A world where OpenAI decides:
Which model gets triggered
On whose silicon
With what latency and context window
For whose customer
This is how AWS won cloud. How Google won search. How Apple won mobile. They didn't just win with product. They won with placement. They became the brokers of attention and compute.
OpenAI is following the same pattern, but with a twist: it wants to mediate cognition itself.
This isn’t just vertical integration. It’s cognitive imperialism. The stack doesn’t need to be owned. It just needs to be routed through you.
And OpenAI intends to sit at the center.