Nov 14
·

The United Times

United in Changing Times

Technology · Business

The unit economics of frontier AI, in three charts

Read the balance sheets, not the demos.

By Raj Patel · 12 min read

Strip away the demos and the frontier-AI economy is a capital expenditure story. Compute commitments now rival the capex of the great railway booms; revenue is real but arrives on a lag.

The three charts that matter are simple: cost per delivered intelligence token, share of enterprise budgets, and depreciation schedules for chips that may be obsolete in three years. On the first, the curve is favorable. On the third, no one is honest yet.