Source丨IT orange
Author丨Wu Meimei
Cover image courtesy of Pexels
In the past few days, Microsoft China has exposed bomb-level news - important departments related to the AI business (involving teams of hundreds of people) will be relocated to the United States or Australia as a whole, and employees can also choose to leave. This news was understood by the media as "Microsoft layoffs/withdrawal from China", it is slightly exaggerated, we will not read too much, this time we only want to discuss AI. In the wave of modern technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly the brightest pearl. Needless to say, the importance of artificial intelligence has become a bargaining chip in the great power game. Obviously, large companies are important participants and promoters of AI, and AI is the standard underlying capability of tech giants, and it is also the "outlet" that they want to try their best to seize at the moment. However, the artificial intelligence technology industry chain itself is profound and long, and its applications involve all aspects and all walks of life. Investments in external AI start-ups and even mergers and acquisitions are also an essential part of the giants' growth and growth. From overseas tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla, to domestic giants such as Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Byte, JD.com, Meituan, and Huawei, we have selected and compared 7 tech giants in China and the United States to see how well you have invested in AI M&A. Among them, there is another company that has a particularly notable M&A in the field of AI, and I would like to call him the "king of AI M&A" among tech giants. His name, did you guess it?
Among the 14 major tech giants in China and the United States, who prefers AI investment the most?
Let's first pull the investment list of 14 Chinese and American technology giants, and find that Tencent's total investment and M&A in artificial intelligence is far ahead.
Note: In addition to Huawei's investment subject is Hubble Investment, BATJ and other entities include a number of different entities, according to IT orange data, Tencent has the highest enthusiasm for investment (including mergers and acquisitions) in AI startups, ranking first among the 14 major technology giants, showing its strong willingness to invest in the field of AI. In addition, Tencent has been the most active CVC investor in China over the years, and the total investment volume is also far ahead. Baidu has invested in 84 AI companies, ranking second, only three fewer than Tencent. Baidu's investment is one of the pioneers of AI technology in China, and this investment is in line with its strategic positioning in the field of AI. The third is Google, which has invested in 74 AI companies, especially in areas such as autonomous driving, AI technology, and smart homes. Alibaba has 65 AI-related investments, reflecting its demand for AI applications in e-commerce, cloud computing, and big data services. Microsoft has also invested heavily in AI, perhaps related to its AI applications in cloud computing services, enterprise software, and gaming. It can be said that in recent years, Chinese giants have played a pivotal role in the investment map of artificial intelligence, surpassing the seven major American technology giants in terms of numbers.
In terms of "verticality" and "focus", that is, the proportion of the giants' investment in the AI field to their total investment - another scenario: Nvidia stands out with a high proportion of 56%. As a major supplier of GPUs and AI chips, Nvidia is a leader in AI hardware and a supplier to many well-known AI companies, so its investment can also show the industry's demand for computing power and Nvidia's determination to invest heavily in AI. Baidu topped the list of Chinese tech companies with 22% of AI investment, followed by Meituan and ByteDance with 15% each. In Tencent's investment map of 1,177 companies, the proportion of AI seems to be a little weak, so that it ranks at the bottom.
Apple: The king of AI M&A among tech giants
Different from equity investment, if you discuss it from the perspective of mergers and acquisitions, it is a different result.
Note: Huawei, Tesla, JD.com did not merge AI companies IT orange data shows that Apple Apple has acquired the most artificial intelligence companies, reaching 15, far surpassing Microsoft Microsoft, Meta, etc., can be described as the "king of AI mergers and acquisitions". From the above figure, it can be found that the number of AI mergers and acquisitions of Chinese technology giants is simply not proportional to the scale of AI investment: except for ByteDance and ByteDance, the top 5 are all American technology giants, which shows that the awareness and willingness of Chinese technology giants represented by Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba in the field of AI mergers and acquisitions are still relatively weak, and they are still more inclined to do equity investment and ecological cooperation. We can take a look at which AI companies Apple has acquired, and is it possible to get any inspiration? Although Apple has maintained a low-key investment and M&A strategy, usually not disclosing the details of its transactions, there are still some clues that can be captured through the business and direction of the investment target. As early as 2014, Apple announced the acquisition of Novauris, a UK-based voice recognition technology company, according to IT Orange data. The Novauris team has been with Apple since the fall of 2013, working to improve Siri technology, a Sirispeech-based virtual assistant service. A year later, to continue optimizing Siri services, Apple acquired VocalIQ, an AI voice company in the UK focused on the automotive market. In 2017, Apple acquired Israel's facial recognition technology company RealFace for $2 million, which mainly provides biometric landing services and can also help users on different platforms select and organize the best photos in their gallery. Let's talk about the most recent – from February to April this year, Apple announced the acquisition of 3 more AI companies, including:
- Datakalab, a French artificial intelligence start-up that claims to offer "a new way to compress computer vision neural networks";
- DarwinAI, a Canadian artificial intelligence company that provides AI visual quality inspection systems for electronics (PCBA) manufacturers;
- Brighter AI, a German artificial intelligence startup, is engaged in anonymization/privacy data (face and license plate data) processing.
To sum up, it is found that most of these AI companies are focused on a technical direction, and the number of employees in the company is not too much, generally around 10~50 people - this is probably also a portrait of Apple's preferred merger and acquisition targets, which is more like a technology company.
We analyzed several key features of Apple's M&A strategy:
First, mergers and acquisitions are usually small in size, or even small companies, and Apple has officially said that it will "acquire smaller technology companies from time to time". Second, the main purpose of mergers and acquisitions, according to our analysis, talent and technology are the main ones, and product and commercialization considerations are secondary, which is completely different from the domestic environment, which may also be an important factor for Apple to maintain innovation for more than a decade. Third, M&A is highly related to the main business, either to improve the old business or to open up new business, and the whole is based on business and strategy. On the whole, Apple's foreign mergers and acquisitions are very low-key, and they are consistent, and they don't want to talk about investment and concentrate on their own product business. These characteristics are not only manifested in the field of AI, but Apple's consistent investment strategy, after all, mergers and acquisitions are engraved in Apple's genes - IT orange data shows that Apple has shown more than 82% of mergers and acquisitions in its investment behavior in the past ten years.
A detailed list of the 7 biggest U.S. tech investments in M&A
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