Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has warned that maintaining a leading position in frontier artificial intelligence will require investments of "hundreds of billions" of dollars over the next five to ten years. Speaking in an episode of the "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis" podcast published Wednesday, Suleyman emphasized that the cost of staying competitive extends beyond infrastructure to include the recruitment and retention of top-tier technical talent. He described Microsoft’s AI ambitions as akin to running a "modern construction company," where hundreds of thousands of engineers, researchers, and technicians are working simultaneously to build massive computing systems—gigawatts of CPUs and AI accelerators—needed to train next-generation models. According to Suleyman, this scale of operation creates a significant structural advantage for large corporations with deep financial resources. Microsoft, with a market capitalization of $3.54 trillion and $77.7 billion in quarterly revenue—surpassing analyst expectations—has the financial capacity to sustain such long-term investments. Suleyman said his mission is to make Microsoft self-sufficient in developing frontier AI models and to assemble a world-class team focused on building what he calls "superintelligence"—systems that not only match but exceed human cognitive abilities. He stressed that Microsoft is committed to developing not just powerful, but also safe and ethically aligned AI. Last month, Suleyman stated his team is striving to build a "humanist superintelligence," one designed to serve human interests and operate responsibly. Despite the massive capital requirements, Suleyman acknowledged the difficulty for startups to compete with Big Tech giants. "It's hard to say" whether smaller companies can keep pace, he said, noting that uncertainty fuels inflated valuations in the AI sector. He added that if artificial general intelligence (AGI) emerges sooner than expected, many players could reach the frontier simultaneously, creating a sudden shift in the competitive landscape. The pursuit of AGI—AI capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across a wide range of tasks—and superintelligence, which surpasses human capabilities, has driven unprecedented spending across the tech industry. Companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon are rapidly expanding their cloud infrastructure and data center capacity to support the training of increasingly complex models. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg echoed this sentiment in September, stating he’d prefer to risk "misspending a couple of hundred billion" rather than fall behind in the race for superintelligence. He warned that falling behind could mean losing out on what he considers the most transformative technology in history—one that will drive innovation, product development, and economic value for decades to come.