Brookfield buys cloud company Ori Industries, making a major bet on AI chips

When one of the world's largest alternative asset managers acquires a company that rents out chips, it says more about the market than any analyst report. Brookfield Asset Management — a Canadian investment giant with more than 900 billion dollars in assets under management — has acquired British cloud computing company Ori Industries, and this deal deserves close attention.

Ori Industries is not the loudest name in the world of cloud computing. The company operates in a niche that can be described as "chips as a service": it provides computational resources — primarily GPUs — for rent to organizations that need to train and run artificial intelligence models but are not ready or able to build their own data centers. Essentially, Ori acts as a middleman between equipment manufacturers and end consumers of computing power, making access to scarce resources more flexible and scalable.

To understand Brookfield's logic, one must look back over the past two years. Since the explosive growth of generative AI in 2023, the world has faced an unprecedented shortage of computational capacity. Nvidia GPUs have become the new oil — they are in short supply for everyone: from startups in Silicon Valley to sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East.

Governments of dozens of countries have announced national AI strategies, and each one comes down to the same question — where can we get enough chips to not fall behind in the technology race. Building new data centers takes years and requires colossal capital investments. The model of renting computational resources in this context transforms from a convenient option into a strategic necessity.

Brookfield, traditionally known for infrastructure investments — energy, real estate, transportation — has been consistently pivoting toward digital infrastructure in recent years. The company has already invested billions in data centers and renewable energy that powers those data centers. The purchase of Ori Industries is a logical continuation of this strategy, but with an important nuance. If previously Brookfield invested in "hardware" and walls — physical buildings and power grids — now the fund is moving to a higher level, toward the software layer of computational distribution. This means that the company sees value not simply in owning servers, but in controlling how computational resources are distributed among consumers.

The details of the deal — its amount and specific terms — are not disclosed at the time of announcement, which is typical for Brookfield, which prefers to work without unnecessary noise. However, the fact of the acquisition itself is telling. The GPU-as-a-service market is growing rapidly: by various estimates, it could reach tens of billions of dollars by the end of the decade. In this space, CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, and dozens of other players are already operating, but consolidation is only beginning. The arrival of institutional investors on Brookfield's scale signals that the market is transitioning from the phase of startup chaos to the phase of mature infrastructure.

For the technology industry, the consequences of this deal go beyond one company. When infrastructure funds with deep pockets start buying up cloud computing providers, it changes the competitive landscape. On one hand, this is good news for consumers: more capital means more capacity, which means potentially more affordable GPU rental prices. On the other hand, the concentration of critical computing infrastructure in the hands of a few large players raises questions about dependency and pricing in the long term. Governments that rely on rented capacity for their national AI programs could find themselves in a vulnerable position.

It is worth noting the geopolitical context separately. In conditions where the United States is tightening export controls on advanced chips, and China is accelerating its own production, access to computational resources becomes a matter not only of business but of national security. Companies like Ori Industries, capable of flexibly redistributing capacity between jurisdictions, acquire strategic significance that goes far beyond their current revenue.

The Brookfield and Ori Industries deal is a marker of a new stage in the development of the AI economy. The era when algorithms and data were the main limitation is fading into the past. Today the main shortage is computing, and those who control access to it will determine the pace of progress for the entire industry. The big money has already figured this out.