The publicly-investable pure-play AI data surface is razor thin. Remove incumbents hoarding data and the only US-listed sells-into-the-boom name of size is Innodata. The social-media corpus owner's licensing is ~5-6% of revenue; the expert-evaluation layer — Scale, Surge, Mercor — stays private. Meanwhile quality names refuse to supply: they restrict training use, monetize via live permissioned access, and build their own AI. By their disclosures they're deployers, not suppliers. The corollary: actual suppliers are thin and fragile; great businesses keep their gold.