Archetype 2: Full-Stack Integrators — The Vertical Powerhouses

The Integration Thesis: Controlling the entire AI value chain—from silicon to consumer applications—creates insurmountable advantages through synergy. Custom silicon designed for proprietary models delivers 10x performance improvements over general-purpose hardware.

What Full-Stack Integrators Sell

Integrated intelligence embedded in existing surfaces.

Moat Type

Distribution + data flywheels + vertical performance advantages.

Google: The Complete Ecosystem Champion

Google emerged as the clear 2025 winner, demonstrating that full-stack integration can work when complexity is well-managed.

The competitive dynamics have flipped:

• Gemini 3 started beating ChatGPT on benchmarks, triggering OpenAI’s “code red”
• Google is in talks to provide TPUs to Meta
• Multi-year partnership with Replit for enterprise “vibe-coding”
• Projected 2026 capex will lift compute spend to $93 billion

The Google Advantage: Vertical integration from TPUs to Gemini to Search/YouTube/Android creates a flywheel competitors cannot replicate. “Once ‘good enough’ intelligence is everywhere, usage flows to wherever it’s most convenient.”

Microsoft: The Enterprise Integration Specialist

Microsoft pursues a variant of full-stack strategy focused on enterprise customers:

• OpenAI partnership ($5B+ investment, exclusive Azure deployment)
• Investment in Anthropic (up to $5 billion)
• Deep Copilot integration across Office 365, Windows, and GitHub
• Agent 365 enables multi-agent orchestration across the entire product suite

Critical Highlight

Once “good enough” intelligence is everywhere, usage flows to where it’s most convenient. Distribution becomes the multiplier.

This is part of a comprehensive analysis. Read the full analysis on The Business Engineer.