Marc Benioff on the AI race

Sara Eisen: Does the U.S. have a leading edge in AI against China, Marc?

Marc Benioff: I think that both have different approaches right now...  I wouldn't say the U.S. has a significant leading edge.  You just saw one of the leading [generative AI] models, which was DeepSeek, emerge, but also now... Alibaba's as well and there's other models as well, and there's different approaches with chips.  So while there's U.S. chips that are very good and very competitive as we saw in the training of the DeepSeek model, there's different approaches with chips and... nobody has a monopoly on training chips or on inference chips.

~ Marc Benioff, "Ray Dalio and Salesforce’s Benioff on AI, trade wars and new world order," CNBC International Live, 21:15 mark, March 14, 2025

Marc Benioff on the commoditization of data centers

We've all heard about these multi-hundred-billion-dollar data center investments...  We have not been doing that.  We're a software company so we're all about building that software over the last 26 years to run on those data centers.  And we've just never seen prices this low for deployment because it is a huge level of investment, and when you get this huge level of investment, it drops prices.  And that means that for us, we're able to run and deploy at a very low cost and it's a commodity product.  Data center against a data center against a data center.  A chipset against a chipset against a chipset.  These are fundamental commodities.  So whether we're running on Alibaba in China or Amazon or Google or maybe somebody else in the future, these are just commodity centers.  And the prices have never been lower, so you have this opportunity to take advantage of companies who are competing with each other to be the next generation hyperscaler.

~ Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, "Ray Dalio and Salesforce’s Benioff on AI, trade wars and new world order," CNBC International Live, 10:20 mark, March 14, 2025

Marc Benioff on optimism from Davos

It's an economic freight train.  Every CEO is bullish.  One of the things about Davos is that it tends to be a tremendous measurement of where things are.  You [interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin] and I were both here in 2008, '09, '10 and you can see when everyone is walking around with their head down.  No one's walking around with their head down.  People are excited and they're feeling good about the world.

~ Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com, CNBC interview from Davos, 2018 World Economic Forum, January 23, 2018