The venture capital market is not just favoring AI. It’s reorganizing itself around AI.
Forbes reported that AI companies captured 65% of all venture deal value in 2025, up from 46% the year prior. That shift happened in a single year. By mid-March 2026, the pattern is continuing. Global VC activity remains highly active in AI, computing infrastructure, and enterprise software, while other sectors compete for the remainder.
The concentration isn’t just about which companies are winning. It’s about how the top tier is being defined. According to multiple market analyses, the largest rounds are increasingly going to companies with demonstrated computing access and global scalability, not just strong technology. Morgan Stanley identifies AI as the central force influencing growth, earnings, geopolitics, and investment strategy across global markets in 2026.
Market analysts have observed that some recent mega-rounds bundle financial capital with computing resource commitments, though the prevalence of this structure is not yet quantified. Industry observers describe an increasingly two-tier market, a top layer receiving outsized capital, and a majority facing conditions that are more selective than the headline numbers suggest.
The practical question isn’t whether AI is dominant in venture capital. It is. The question is which AI companies are on the right side of that divide, and what it takes to get there.
This item connects to OpenAI’s $1.4 trillion data center commitment, which illustrates how infrastructure scale is becoming a defining feature of the top tier.