Full title from the article: "7. Strategic investments from cloud providers into AI startups—and the associated accounting implications—will be challenged by regulators."

All these predictions are taken from Forbes/Rob Toews' "10 AI Predictions For 2024".
For the 2023 predictions you can find them here, and their resolution here.
You can find all the markets under the tag [2024 Forbes AI predictions].

• I will resolve to whatever Forbes/Rob Toews say in their resolution article for 2024's predictions.

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Description of this prediction from the article:
A tidal wave of investment capital has flowed from large technology companies into AI startups this year.

Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI in January and then led a $1.3 billion funding round in Inflection in June. This fall, Amazon announced that it would invest up to $4 billion into Anthropic. Not to be outdone, Alphabet announced weeks later that it would invest up to $2 billion into Anthropic. Nvidia, meanwhile, has been perhaps the most prolific AI investor in the world this year, plowing money into dozens of AI startups that use its GPUs including Cohere, Inflection, Hugging Face, Mistral, CoreWeave, Inceptive, AI21 Labs and Imbue.

It is not hard to see that the motivation for making these investments is, at least in part, to secure these high-growth AI startups as long-term compute customers.

Such investments can implicate an important gray area in accounting rules. This may sound like an esoteric topic—but it will have massive implications for the competitive landscape in AI going forward.

Say a cloud vendor invests $100 million into an AI startup based on a guarantee that the startup will turn around and spend that $100 million on the cloud vendor’s services. Conceptually, this is not true arms-length revenue for the cloud vendor; the vendor is, in effect, using the investment to artificially transform its own balance sheet cash into revenue.

These types of deals—often referred to as “round-tripping” (since the money goes out and comes right back in)—have raised eyebrows this year among Silicon Valley leaders like VC Bill Gurley.

The devil is in the details. Not all of the deals mentioned above necessarily represent true instances of round-tripping. It matters, for instance, whether an investment comes with an explicit obligation for the startup to spend the capital on the investor’s products, or simply encourages broad strategic collaboration between the two organizations. The contracts between Microsoft and OpenAI, or between Amazon and Anthropic, are not publicly available, so we cannot say for sure how they are structured.

But at least in some cases, cloud providers may well be recognizing revenue via these investments that they should not be.

These deals have proceeded with little to no regulatory scrutiny to this point. This will change in 2024. Expect the SEC to take a much harder look at round-tripping in AI investments next year—and expect the number and size of such deals to drop dramatically as a result.

Given that cloud providers have been one of the largest sources of capital fueling the generative AI boom to date, this could have a material impact on the overall AI fundraising environment in 2024.