Snowflake, Cisco Battle for AI Stack Control

AI companies are racing to establish dominance over the emerging AI stack, with the ultimate prize being control of what analysts call the system of intelligence. Snowflake and Databricks are key rivals, but face growing competition from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, all converging on how users interact with data. Cisco sees a major opportunity in AI networking, while Nvidia has surprisingly surpassed Cisco in networking revenue through custom Ethernet design. Meanwhile, a new concern called tokenmaxxing is emerging, as users rack up unexpectedly high AI costs, raising fears of unsustainable spending and potential market instability.