TL;DR

Todd Boehly’s asset manager Eldridge, which runs roughly £56bn ($75bn), has bought half of European AI company Sudolabs and is rolling the technology through more than 100 portfolio businesses, Chelsea Football Club and film studio A24 among them. The stated reason for buying rather than partnering is to avoid being captive to one American AI supplier.

Owning the capability instead of renting it

Rival investment groups have taken the partnership route: Blackstone and Apollo both signed with Anthropic, and Bain, TPG and Brookfield went in together on an OpenAI joint venture. Eldridge chose ownership instead, taking half of Sudolabs and with it access to around 70 specialists, roughly 40 of them engineers.

Boehly was blunt about the reasoning. “Single-sourced is never a good place to be, no matter what you’re talking about,” he told the FT, citing supply chains, energy infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re credit people, and we know what being captive means when you’re a credit person.” Anthropic has handled comparable work for the group, but Eldridge preferred not to let the dependency concentrate there.

What it looks like in practice

Chelsea is using AI to analyse injuries, aiming to cut the time players spend unavailable. A24 has a research partnership with Google DeepMind, worth around £56m ($75mn), examining how AI might support film-making. Internally, Eldridge intends to use the technology to speed up due diligence and strip manual work out of its investment process.

Boehly’s thesis on which businesses survive the technology is narrow: those with unique data, physical assets and intellectual property that cannot be replicated. Co-founder Tony Minella, who has led the AI push for two years, framed it as retraining people rather than installing software — giving colleagues the tools and skills to rethink their workflows.

Looking forward

For UK readers, the Chelsea line is the eye-catching detail, but the vendor-concentration argument is the transferable one. It lands the same week Moody’s warned that banks’ reliance on a small set of AI model and cloud providers risks creating systemic dependency, and days after HM Treasury proposed an assurance framework for third-party AI in financial services. An investor buying a supplier outright is an expensive answer to that problem; most UK firms will have to solve it through contracts and multi-vendor design instead.