Featured
Paper
Jun. 3, 2024
Data Insight
Feb. 26, 2026
Data Insight
Mar. 12, 2025
AI is attracting unprecedented levels of investment, with companies spending billions on hardware, data centers, and talent to build frontier models. The costs are rising fast, and the gap between what companies are spending and what they are earning is an important dynamic in the industry. Epoch tracks the financial side of AI development: what it costs to train and run models, how much companies are spending and earning, and how hardware prices are trending.
Our open database of AI chip sales, using financial reports, company disclosures, and more to estimate compute, power usage, and spending over time for a wide variety of AI chips.
China's six leading AI firms earn about 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic's combined AI revenue. Epoch AI examines their five revenue streams: consumer apps, model access, enterprise and government solutions, licensing fees, and indirect monetization through cloud and advertising.
Memory shipped through 2027 could run 33–171 million concurrent frontier-model agents, or billions using efficient open models. Epoch AI estimates inference capacity from HBM supply, serving benchmarks, and agent-hour costs.
How quickly are Anthropic and OpenAI growing their revenue?
Why Anthropic's buildout suggests that financing is unlikely to be the immediate blocker to frontier AI compute growth.
Aggregate cash capex across Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle is on track to overtake operating cash flow in Q3 2026. Epoch AI's breakdown of how hyperscalers are financing the AI buildout.
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) accounts for 63% of AI chip component costs, up from 52% in Q1 2024. Epoch AI's breakdown of component cost shifts across major chip designers.
A typical one-gigawatt AI data center requires $38 billion in up-front capital expenditure (CapEx) and $0.9 billion in annual operating expenses (OpEx).
Anthropic and OpenAI generate roughly $14M and $6.5M in revenue per employee — higher than any other tech company in the Forbes Global 2000. Continued rapid growth in this metric at tens of billions in annualized revenue is unusual, and could reflect productivity gains from AI adoption.
A prolonged Hormuz crisis probably won't derail the compute buildout, but it could slow data center expansion and disrupt Gulf investment flows into AI.