From Ads to AI: How Big Tech Took Over Everything

Microsoft offices in Vancouver, Canada. Credit Unsplash/Matthew Manuel

By Maximilian Malawista
NEW YORK, Jul 18 2025 (IPS)

“The power of AI carries immense responsibilities. Today, that power sits in the hands of a few,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the 2025 AI Action Summit, reflecting on a deepening reality as we inch closer to a world in complete digital domination. Today, seven of the world’s top ten most valuable companies are digital giants, focusing primarily on the output of communication, digital manufacturing, artificial intelligence and digital commerce, which is paving the way for a fully digitized life for all.

The top 10 companies include some of the biggest names in information technology and digital commerce:

NVIDIA: 4.002 trillion USD | Information Technology
Microsoft: 3.727 trillion USD | Information Technology
Apple: 3.172 trillion USD | Information Technology
Amazon: 2.359 trillion USD | Consumer Discretionary
Alphabet (Google): 2.161 trillion USD | Communication Services
Meta Platforms (Facebook): 1.828 trillion USD | Communication Services
Saudi Aramco: 1.627 trillion USD | Energy
Broadcom: 1.295 trillion USD | Information Technology
TSMC: 1.191 trillion USD | Information Technology
Berkshire Hathaway: 1.032 trillion USD | Consumer Discretionary

These companies actively reshape nearly every aspect of life, from showing you an ad for the brand-new phone you have been eyeing, to manufacturing the chip inside that very phone, and even delivering it to your doorstep. They are all connected and can be done from a single click of the screen.

Some of these firms have a near-digital monopoly on all aspects of the digital economy. Take Microsoft for example:

E-Commerce and digital payment: Microsoft.com
Digital content and distribution: Xbox Game Pass, Windows Store, Microsoft Store
Social media: Teams, LinkedIn
Online search: Bing
Online Advertising: Bing, Microsoft, LinkedIn Ads
Cloud Services: Azure, Microsoft 365
AI Models: Copilot

Your entire life can be run from one of these services, from finding your local market for groceries, to buying a new laptop for work, to storing your sensitive data, creating visualizations for that new project you’re working on, or even purchasing a video game. It’s all done from one company spread across a few platforms.

Market limitations amid consolidation

The vertical and horizontal consolidation of digital supply chains has made it nearly impossible for new companies to break into just about any of these markets. A lack of competition ultimately fuels higher prices, lower quality, and weakened privacy protection for the consumer.

Consumers often unknowingly support and reinforce this system. If they rely on Google across all their devices, it creates a cycle which lacks digital diversity, increasing the difficulty for smaller entities to innovate and break into the market.

By design, digital ecosystems keep users within the limits of a single company’s platforms, making it easy for the user to move from service to service, but at the hidden cost of freely giving up your data.

Advertising plays a vital role in this campaign for dominance. 97.6 percent of Meta’s revenue and 75.6 percent of Google’s comes just from ads. Just by being on their platforms you’re generating billions of dollars, without paying a single cent for use.

Unchecked growth

From 2020 to 2024, digital multinationals enterprises (MNEs) accounted for one-third of all greenfield data center projects, initiatives built entirely from the ground up. Logistic projects in contrast only accounted for 10 percent. This displays just how massively the digital world is expanding, fueled by investments in immersive online environments where users are increasingly spending money on non-physical assets, creating endless revenues streams out of thin air.

In China, the concentration of digital markets is comparatively extreme than in other countries, given that certain American applications do not work there. A handful of firms — Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance — control the population’s entire digital ecosystem. As the second-most populous country in the world, this is no small feat. WeChat alone is used by 95 percent of their population, centralizing social media, messaging, payments, and e-commerce into one platform. This means that competition effectively does not exist.

From 2017 to 2025, the combined share of sales between the top five digital MNEs doubled from 21 percent to 48 percent, displaying immense growth in a merely eight-year period. This trend was also observed within asset concentration, where the top five digital firms doubled from 17 percent to now 35 percent during that same period

Artificial Intelligence (AI) consolidation

As digital markets surge, so does dominance in the AI value chain. Just two companies, Microsoft and Alphabet, control 78 percent of AI development from start to finish, largely through their partnerships with startups like OpenAI and Anthropic. This allows them to virtually own every link in the chain, from data collection to model training and deployment, to application.

Generative AI requires massive capital, but also computing power, cloud services, AI chips, talent, and most importantly, data, which only the tech giants control. There is hardly, if any room for smaller firms to compete. This dynamic has shown to have serious market limiting implications, as AI will become necessary to digital expansion.

As UN Secretary General António Guterres warned at the 79th General Assembly in 2024, “A handful of companies and even individuals have already amassed enormous power over the development of AI – with little accountability or oversight for the moment.”

IPS UN Bureau Report