For years, the AI race was defined by a fierce competition to hire and retain a small group of elite AI researchers and engineers. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Anthropic and others turned compensation into a powerful competitive lever, offering millions to tens of millions of dollars in pay packages to attract AI talent.
But that era is giving way to a new phase of competition, where the key question isn’t who has the most AI engineers, but who can build the most data centers the fastest. It’s electricity, water and physical infrastructure that…
