Why Are All These Billionaires Investing in TAO?

Why are so many wealthy and experienced technology investors suddenly circling Bittensor? Some of these guys are investing in subnets, some are building funds around TAO and subnet tokens, while others are publicly paying attention to what the network is producing.

But they all seem to be arriving at a similar idea: AI is becoming one of the world’s most important industries, and the infrastructure underneath it does not necessarily have to belong to a handful of companies.

Barry Silbert is probably the most obvious example. His Digital Currency Group (DCG) backed Yuma, which is entirely focused on building around Bittensor, and later anchored Yuma Asset Management with $10 million to give investors exposure to alpha tokens. Barry has described decentralized AI as potentially being as transformative as Bitcoin. For someone who was early to Bitcoin and spent years building investment infrastructure around crypto, committing this much attention and capital to Bittensor says something.

You can see the same thinking further down the network. Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke and early Google investor Ram Shriram participated in Manifold Labs’ $10.5 million Series A alongside DCG and other investors. Manifold operates Targon, Bittensor Subnet 4, which is building decentralized AI compute and inference infrastructure. These are people who have already watched enormous technology platforms emerge. What they are backing here is the possibility that AI infrastructure itself becomes a competitive market where independent providers can supply compute and intelligence.

That is what makes Bittensor different from most crypto AI projects. It is not asking investors to bet on one AI company finding one successful product. There are subnets competing across compute, inference, agents, data, model training and other areas, with TAO being underneath that economy. Some of those businesses will fail, of course, but investors can still be interested in the larger network because Bittensor keeps producing new attempts at solving valuable AI problems. In a way, TAO gives exposure to the growth of the marketplace itself.

Jason Calacanis is another good example of how that maxim is spreading. He has publicly said he seeded a Bittensor-focused fund with a few hundred thousand dollars, and he has become increasingly vocal about the network. More importantly, he has also talked about using Bittensor services and seeing dramatically lower inference costs. If decentralized markets can genuinely make AI services cheaper or better like this, then the value proposition will become much easier for traditional technology investors to understand.

Chamath Palihapitiya belongs in a slightly different category. There is no public confirmation that he personally owns TAO, so it would be wrong to present him as a confirmed investor. But earlier this year, he brought Bittensor’s decentralized training work directly into a conversation with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, helping put the network’s technical progress in front of a much wider technology audience.

And that leads us to the reason Bittensor is attracting this kind of attention. The bet is not really on crypto. It is on who owns the infrastructure of the AI economy. If AI becomes embedded in almost everything, then compute, models, data and intelligence become enormously valuable resources. Bittensor is trying to create open markets for those resources, where anyone can compete and the best providers can earn.

Following wealthy investors blindly is never a good investment strategy. They can be wrong, early or investing for reasons completely different from everyone else. But when people who were early to Bitcoin, Google, Zcash, Shopify and other major technology revolutions start putting serious capital and attention into the same relatively young ecosystem, it is worth asking what they see.

They are probably not looking only at what Bittensor is today. They are looking at what it could become if decentralized AI works. And if Bittensor really does become an open marketplace for the infrastructure powering AI, then owning TAO could eventually mean owning a piece of the economy underneath it.

➛ Watch the full video on Gordon’s YouTube: