What distinguishes the current AI funding moment from prior technology booms is not the size of the numbers — it is the identity of the buyers. In previous cycles, venture capital funded companies that then went to find customers in open markets. The frontier AI cycle has inverted that sequence: the companies writing the largest checks are also the companies consuming the largest amounts of compute and API capacity from the very firms they are funding. Amazon's $138 billion compute commitment to OpenAI and its combined $65 billion pledge into…