People spend a lot of time on their devices. The AI boom means they will also be spending more for them. Why it matters: The enormous sums of money going into the AI race are driving up costs for resources and components throughout the economy. - That's now becoming increasingly apparent to ordinary Americans who might have thought that AI's impact would be primarily on their jobs. Driving the news: Apple provided the clearest evidence yet Thursday, raising prices by as much as 25% on MacBook and iPad models — and blaming soaring memory chip costs due to AI demand. - The same memory squeeze is now hitting gaming consoles. Also on Thursday, Microsoft announced price increases of as much as $150 on Xbox consoles — which comes after…
IT budgets are getting blown out as some companies increasingly spend more on AI than on employees' salaries. Why it matters: Maybe human labor will be more cost efficient after all. What they're saying: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees," Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios. - Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs, according to The Information. - Amos Bar-Joseph, CEO of Swan AI, bragged about his Anthropic bill in a viral LinkedIn post , saying "We're building the first autonomous business - scaling with intelligence, not headcount." Zoom out: Worldwide IT spending is expected to reach $6.31…
AI may never be as cheap to use as it is today. Why it matters: AI companies are hooking users with low prices that won't last — straight out of the Amazon and Uber playbook. The big picture: The push to show profits before IPOs could end the era of cheap AI. - "These LLM companies are going to go public and they're going to raise prices because they have to," May Habib, CEO of Writer, told Axios. State of play: New models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are generally getting faster and cheaper. - The industry was fixated on training chips. Now Nvidia and its rivals are focused on inference — the computing that lets models answer your questions. - Aggregate token pricing — the cost of generating text — has fallen, partly due…
AI is concentrating stocks, bonds, private credit — and even the broader economy — around a single bet. Why it matters: Tech companies are projected to issue over $1 trillion in debt to fund their AI goals this year. Yet there's little evidence the technology can be monetized at a scale that justifies the bet . State of play: Hyperscalers — the AI data-center giants — could spend up to $700 billion from their balance sheets on AI this year, while issuing eye-popping debt to access even more capital, according to UBS. - The eight largest companies, all tech firms with AI ambitions, make up nearly half of the S&P 500. - More than half of invested venture-capital dollars went to AI firms in 2025, per PitchBook. - Private credit…