The world of artificial intelligence today is not only a race for models or markets. It has become, above all, a race for people. The names that make the headlines are not always the names of companies or products, but of researchers and engineers being pulled from one lab to another like prized mercenaries. Each poach carries with it a kind of triumphalism—an announcement that says, “We are winning. We have the talent.”
But those headlines don’t tell the whole story. In fact, they hide the beginning of a spiral that changes the balance of power in the industry.
The Poaching Premium
When a company signs a star researcher, the price is never just salary. It is a package that often includes equity grants, sign-on bonuses, relocation, sometimes even promises of resources or teams that will be built around them. This is already an extraordinary “cost of acquisition.” Unlike customer acquisition cost, which can sometimes be scaled down with clever marketing or automation, talent acquisition cost in AI only seems to scale upward.
Poaching does not obey normal market discipline. It runs on strategic urgency. You don’t pay a star researcher to fill a gap—you pay them to deprive a rival, to create the impression of momentum, to reassure investors that you’re still in the fight. That urgency means you will accept terms you might otherwise reject.
Locked-In Spending
But the moment the contract is signed, another reality sets in. That talent cannot be allowed to sit idle. A researcher brought in on an eight-figure package must be surrounded with everything they need to succeed. That means racks of GPUs, custom data pipelines, annotation contracts, specialized frameworks, and an army of supporting engineers.
What was once a single expensive hire becomes an ecosystem commitment. The company is now locked in—not only to the person, but to the tools and infrastructure that person insists on using. And once locked in, the bargaining power shifts.
The Vendors’ Advantage
If you sell GPUs, or if you host compute in the cloud, or if you control a specialized piece of software that has become the researcher’s preference, the headlines about talent poaching are good news. They tell you which companies are trapped.
Think about it. A lab that has just spent tens of millions to bring in a high-profile figure cannot risk under-equipping them. It cannot argue too hard over GPU prices. It cannot balk at cloud contracts. It cannot afford to nickel-and-dime the vendors, because the cost of embarrassing their star is higher than any markup.
This is why suppliers quietly cheer when talent wars make the front page. Each poach loosens the negotiation room for them. They know the buyer is committed. They know the buyer must spend. And they can raise their own demands accordingly.
The Spiral of Escalation
This produces a spiral. Talent costs are high, so infrastructure costs climb behind them. Infrastructure costs climb, so companies must justify their spending with faster and riskier product pushes. Those product pushes require yet more talent to scale. And so the cycle continues.
On the outside, the story looks like a battle between labs—OpenAI versus Anthropic, Google versus Meta. Grok versus all of them. But underneath, the real beneficiaries are the suppliers. NVIDIA, with its grip on GPUs, has grown into one of the most valuable companies in the world not just because its chips are good, but because it sits in the middle of this spiral. Every new poach guarantees demand for its hardware. Every public headline is another confirmation of dependence.
Illusions of Power
This is the irony of the talent wars: the companies paying the highest premiums are not necessarily gaining the most leverage. They may be buying reputation, or buying time, but they are also handing bargaining power to the very suppliers they must rely on.
The illusion is that talent is the battlefield. The reality is that talent is only the opening move. The war is not won by who signs the most researchers, but by who controls the things those researchers cannot live without.
The Quiet Winners
In the long run, the loudest players may not be the real winners. The labs will keep announcing hires, raising funds, and pushing products. But the companies sitting in the shadows—the chipmakers, the cloud giants, the infrastructure providers—are the ones whose leverage compounds. They are not playing at the surface where names and headlines flash. They are playing at the foundation, where the spiral of spending ultimately comes to rest.
The talent war is visible. The leverage war is hidden. And when the dust settles, it may be clear that the most powerful players in AI were not the labs who poached the stars, but the suppliers who quietly raised the prices once those stars were in place.
Author: Michael Abioye
Lagos, Nigeria
Senior Writer
