The Switzerland Strategy: How to Profit from AI Without Building AI
Ritesh Vajariya
CEO, AI Guru — 50K+ Users, 4 Live Products | Ex-AWS, Cerebras, Bloomberg
How "boring" infrastructure companies are quietly getting rich while AI companies burn billions trying to win the model wars
Last week, I was catching up with an old AWS colleague who just joined Nvidia.
"You know what's crazy?" he said. "Everyone's obsessed with building AI applications on top of these models. Meanwhile, the companies just routing traffic between AI models are printing money."
I stopped mid-sentence. Because I'd literally just had this exact conversation with a VC who was panicking about his portfolio.
Here's what both of them see that 99% of people don't: The real AI gold rush isn't about building AI. It's about being Switzerland.
Let me explain why this completely changes everything.
The Phone Call That Changed My Perspective
Two weeks ago, a venture capitalist I know called me. Real panic in his voice.
"Ritesh, we just put $50 million into an AI startup. They're burning $800K monthly on GPT-5 and Claude. Their biggest competitor? Ten engineers using Llama and Mistral who spend $50K monthly. 85% of the same features. 10x better margins."
I asked him one question: "Why didn't you invest in the company that helps both of them?"
Dead silence.
Then he hung up on me.
An hour later, he called back. "Holy shit. You're talking about OpenRouter, aren't you?"
Yep. And that's when I realized most people are looking at AI completely wrong.
The Company Processing $100 Million That Nobody Knows
Let me tell you about OpenRouter. Never heard of them? Exactly. That's the point.
While OpenAI burns billions and everyone fights over who has the best model, OpenRouter does something stupidly simple: They route API calls to 400+ models from 60+ providers.
That's it. They're basically a traffic cop for AI.
Their cut? 5% of every dollar.
I did the math. They hit $5 million in annual revenue in May. Up from $1 million in December. That's 400% growth in five months. And they're processing over $100 million in AI spending.
They have over a million developers using them. Not because they're building revolutionary AI. But because they're the pipes everyone needs.
Remember what I learned at AWS? The companies that own the infrastructure always win. Always.
🚀 Quick Wins You Can Build This Weekend
The Copy-Paste Plays:
One guy built the token counter in 4 hours. Now makes $8K/month. Dumb, simple, profitable.
My Amazon Bedrock Story (Why I Know This Works)
Look, I need to tell you something. I was literally there when this playbook was written.
I was a founding member of the Amazon Bedrock launch team at AWS. Spent 18+ countries evangelizing our "model-agnostic" approach. People thought we were crazy. "Why not just pick the best model?"
Fast forward to today: 4.7x customer growth in 2025. AWS generating $29.3 billion quarterly. The AI backlog alone? $156.6 billion.
You know what Bedrock does? Same thing as OpenRouter but for enterprises. We give you access to Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral, all through one API.
Fortune 500 companies don't want to bet on one model. They want Switzerland. They want options. They want someone else to handle the complexity.
That's when it hit me: This pattern works at every scale.
The GitHub Moment That's Happening Right Now
Remember GitHub? They never built programming languages. They just hosted everyone's code. Microsoft bought them for $7.5 billion.
Hugging Face is doing the exact same playbook for AI.
They host over 1 million models. They don't compete with OpenAI or Google. They host everyone's models. Meta's Llama, Google's models, thousands of open source alternatives.
Revenue? $70-85 million ARR. And here's the kicker - their CEO just announced they're profitable. While OpenAI loses $5 billion.
The business model is beautiful:
They're not selling AI. They're selling the infrastructure for AI. And they're crushing it.
The $100 Test
Spending $100 on AI:
Building AI:
Being Switzerland:
Same $100. Different game.
The Public Market Proof (This Is Real Money)
Want to know how real this is? Let me tell you about two companies that went public recently.
CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) went public in March at $40/share. They provide GPU infrastructure. Not AI models. Just the compute everyone needs.
Stock price today? Tripled. Market cap? Over $58 billion.
They just acquired Weights & Biases for $1.7 billion. W&B doesn't build AI either. They're the system of record for training models at OpenAI, Meta, and Nvidia.
Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) - spun out from Yandex - just signed a $17.4 billion deal with Microsoft for AI infrastructure. Stock jumped 50%.
Think about that. Microsoft, with all their resources, is paying $17 billion to a neutral infrastructure provider instead of building it themselves.
The market gets it. Switzerland wins.
The Pattern I Can't Unsee
After 20 years in tech - Bloomberg, Cerebras, AWS, now AI Guru - I've seen this movie before:
The Builders (Losing Money):
The Switzerland Players (Making Bank):
The pattern is so obvious it hurts: Building AI loses money. Enabling AI makes money.
Why Right Now Is Different (The DeepSeek Wake-Up Call)
Remember January when DeepSeek built a ChatGPT competitor for $5.6 million? Not billion. Million.
That was the moment everything changed.
GPT-5 launched in August. Claude 4.1 followed. Gemini 2.5 Pro. They're all within 1-2% performance of each other. Llama 3.1 open source is at 88.6% vs GPT-5's 90%.
Pricing? Below $0.50 per million tokens. Everyone.
Models are becoming commodities. Fast.
But you know what's not commoditized? The infrastructure to use them all.
The Clock Is Ticking (Why You Need to Move NOW)
The Switzerland window is closing because:
In 18 months, the obvious plays will be taken. Right now? Wide open.
The Playbook (Exactly What I'm Doing)
Look, I spent years at AWS watching this pattern. Built at Cerebras, Bloomberg. Now running AI Guru.
Here's exactly how the Switzerland strategy works:
Step 1: Find the Integration Pain Every company I talk to says the same thing: "We want AI but don't know which model to use."
Pick ONE pain point:
Step 2: Don't Innovate. Aggregate. A friend built a simple cost comparison dashboard for AI models. That's it. $30K MRR in 3 months.
Another built prompt conversion between models. $200K ARR.
Dumb, simple, profitable.
Step 3: Never Pick Sides The moment you favor one platform, you lose Switzerland status. Stay neutral. Help everyone.
Step 4: Take Your Cut
Your Switzerland Math
If you capture just 0.01% of the $644B GenAI market:
From 0.01% market share. Let that sink in.
The $644 Billion Reality Check
Gartner says $644 billion will be spent on GenAI by 2025.
Where does Switzerland capture value?
That's $320 billion for neutral players. Not fighting. Just facilitating.
And here's the beautiful part: The AI companies need Switzerland more than Switzerland needs them.
The Plot Twist Nobody Sees Coming
Here's what's really wild: The AI companies WANT Switzerland to exist.
Why? Because it gives them distribution without sales teams. OpenAI doesn't want to build invoicing, compliance, uptime monitoring, or multi-model management. They want to build models.
Want proof this is real?
It's symbiotic. They need you as much as you need them.
Sometimes being neutral is more valuable than being the best. That's the secret Wall Street is starting to understand. That's why infrastructure stocks are mooning while AI companies struggle.
Your Next 48 Hours
You're now a Switzerland player. Welcome to the winning side.
My Bottom Line (And Yours)
After launching Bedrock at AWS, building at Cerebras, and now running AI Guru, I've learned one thing:
The shovel sellers always beat the gold miners.
In cloud, AWS/Azure/Google won by providing infrastructure. In mobile, Apple/Google won by owning platforms. In AI, the neutral infrastructure players will win.
Oracle proved it - boring database company added $250 billion in market value just for having infrastructure.
The playbook is simple:
While everyone else burns billions fighting to build the best AI, you can build a profitable business just helping them all work together.
The gold rush miners mostly went broke. The people selling shovels? They built dynasties.
And unlike the gold rush, this one is just beginning.
The One Thing to Remember
The AI war has winners and losers. The arms dealers? They always win.
Be the arms dealer.
—Ritesh
VP of Data Analytics @ Assurant – Driving AI-Powered Insights in Insurance | Process Improvement, Automation & Operational Excellence Evangelist
6dGreat insights on being the "Switzerland" of AI. As AI ecosystems evolve, how might neutral platforms adapt to generative AI advancements and ensure they stay competitive?
AI enthusiast | GPUs |Agentic AI
6dWell written Ritesh Vajariya . Utility company makes more money than appliances makers.
I help B2B founders scale in 6 weeks - no hiring, no new tools, just custom AI Automation & AI Agents
6dGood catch. Security and privacy are also classic Swiss plays. Neutral, trusted, and paid by everyone.