AI Value Capture
The AI industry has experienced a significant shift in value capture, with AI labs now capturing most of the value, driven by a surge in demand for tokens and improvements in software and hardware. This has led to a huge return on investment for end users, who can now accomplish tasks in minutes with a few dollars' worth of tokens. The value of tokens is dramatically improving businesses, with companies such as Anthropic and SemiAnalysis experiencing significant revenue and margin growth.
- ▪Agentic AI has crossed a real inflection point, driving a step-change in the value of tokens and sharply reducing the cost of generating them.
- ▪The AI labs are now capturing most of the value, with Anthropic's ARR exploding from $9B to over $44B and gross margins increasing from 38% to over 70%.
- ▪New chips such as Blackwells can generate 30x more tokens per second while running frontier workloads today vs Hoppers a year ago.
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AI Value Capture - The Shift To Model LabsVera Rubin VR NVL72: V for Value - Rubin delivers a step jump in performance per TCO. ROI accruing to users, Neoclouds, Hyperscalers, AI Labs, Memory Vendors or GPU Manufacturers?Daniel Nishball, Dylan Patel, Cheang Kang Wen, and 6 othersMay 01, 2026∙ Paid31129ShareA day in AI now feels like a year in any other industry. Model releases, software breakthroughs, and hardware improvements are compressing multi-year cycles for any other industry into weeks. Over just the past few months, agentic AI has crossed a real inflection point, driving a step-change in the value of tokens while software and hardware improvements have sharply reduced the cost of generating them.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Semianalysis.
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