Moonshots panelist, Dave, says AI firms have dangled US$5m–US$10m cheques for corporate datasets

What was said

"Yeah, you know, we we've been reached out to by a bunch of the companies that you just mentioned, plus OpenAI, plus a couple of others, all saying we want to we want to write 5105 million checks to buy corporations that have data outright. And so, the first thing you want to do is make it easy for them to sign a check."

A Moonshots panellist identified as Dave says his team has been contacted by several AI companies—naming Scale, a firm he calls “Merore”, and OpenAI—seeking to buy companies outright for their data, with suggested cheque sizes of around US$5–10 million. He advises an audience member with decades of civil-engineering project records to prepare a clear due-diligence package to make a deal easier to execute, adding that labs may be slow to respond because “it’s chaos”.