Shark Tank investor says entrepreneurs should skip ChatGPT, shares 2 AI business ideas

Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary says aspiring entrepreneurs shouldn't try to compete with tech giants by building the next ChatGPT. 

Instead, in a video released earlier this year, he pointed to two AI-adjacent businesses he'd pursue if he were starting his career today: helping small businesses adopt AI, and building the data centers that power it.

The first choice O'Leary makes involves getting small businesses to implement AI, AI and develop new models. Thcentresn is that millions of companies can see the power of AI but cannot figure out how to implement it in their processes, manage data, and automate processes.

Given the presence of roughly 36 million small businesses in America and their contribution of almost 50% to economic activity, per the Small Business Administration, O'Leary notices a gap between large organisations that have their AI departments and small businesses requiring implementation rather than consultancy.

"There's going to be a massive amount of people wanting to use it that don't know how, and they're willing to pay to solve that pain point," he said.

O’Leary’s second choice is the building of data centres, which O’Leary believes to be the biggest constraint faced by the industry. "The biggest pain point in AI is data centres," O’Leary explained. "That's real-estate development."

This belief can be backed up by O’Leary’s personal investments in two massive data centre projects worth $70 billion and $100 billion in Alberta, Canada, and Utah, respectively.

Indeed, O’Leary’s optimism towards data centres is consistent with industry estimates as well. In its forecast for 2030, Goldman Sachs Research expects global data center energy consumption to increase by 165% from current levels as of 2023, primarily due to centrege.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta continue investing billions of dollars into the development of their AI infrastructure, and analysts believe that what constrains the growth now are not chips but other factors such as electricity supply, connection to the electrical grid, availability of land and cooling.