Satya Nadella calls for AI era built on shared economic gains, not extraction

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has urged the global technology industry to move away from zero-sum thinking in the AI era, stating that artificial intelligence must generate positive-sum value rather than extract it. In a new post, he emphasised that companies should use this technological wave to build their own capabilities instead of inadvertently surrendering their core value to the tech sector, adding that a platform only becomes meaningful when the economic value created for its users surpasses that of the company that built it, a principle long articulated by Bill Gates.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the net benefit of the AI platform wave is. The real question is how to empower every company out there to get more out of this platform shift and build their own AI native capabilities and enterprise value (vs inadvertently just transfer their…

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 15, 2025

Nadella pointed to Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI as an example of mutual reinforcement, explaining that Microsoft’s investment helped OpenAI scale while OpenAI’s research accelerated Microsoft’s own innovation. He further highlighted work with Nvidia, noting that the world’s first AI superfactory was co-designed with OpenAI and informed by three generations of AI supercomputers developed through joint efforts, and said that bringing AMD into the inference fleet enabled AMD to speed up development of its own AI software stack.

Nadella stated that this shared infrastructure is now positioned to support startups and enterprises seeking to build AI-native capabilities. Nadella informed that the true value of the AI wave will be demonstrated not through soaring valuations but through real-world transformation, such as pharmaceutical companies bringing new therapies to market in a single year rather than twelve, or farmers predicting and preventing crop failures.

He also warned that organisations must retain sovereignty over their data and value chains and said that this moment offers an opportunity to ensure the broad diffusion of AI technologies with choice and control at the forefront.