AI and compute economics
2026-04-26
9 minute read
5 sources
AI inference cost decline 2026: the trajectory and what it forces buyers to plan for
Token prices have fallen roughly 10x per year for equivalent capability since 2023, and the buyers who treat inference as a fixed line item are mispricing every AI roadmap they own.
Inference token pricing has compressed faster than almost any input cost in modern enterprise computing, with frontier model prices falling roughly an order of magnitude per year for any fixed capability tier between 2023 and 2026. The decline is driven by the Hopper to Blackwell hardware step, kernel and serving optimizations, FP8 and FP...