Three stories about how AI companies stopped competing on capability and started competing on leverage — and what the squeeze means for every CEO writing checks right now.

Stories covered:

• Musk's Grok Toll Booth — The New York Times confirmed Elon Musk is requiring every bank advising the SpaceX IPO to purchase Grok enterprise subscriptions. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and others have committed tens of millions. Not because Grok won a bake-off — because the alternative is losing access to $500M+ in advisory fees from a $50B+ raise.
• GPU Prices Surge 48% — The Ornn Compute Price Index shows Nvidia Blackwell GPU rentals now cost $4.08/hour, up from $2.75 eight weeks ago. Half of planned 2026 data center builds are delayed — not by chips or capital, but by 5-year lead times on high-voltage electrical transformers.
• OpenAI Kills Sora — OpenAI is discontinuing its video generation tool with roughly six months notice. A Futurum Group survey found 61% of enterprises cite OpenAI as their primary generative AI platform — raising hard questions about single-vendor dependency.

Action items:

• Lock in compute contracts before the next price jump
• Build optionality into your vendor stack before a deprecation notice forces your hand
• If 40%+ of your AI workloads run on a single vendor, draft a migration playbook now

Hosted by Stephen Forte. New episodes weekdays.