AI compute and energy
2026-04-26
10 minute read
10 sources
Frontier AI training cost trajectory 2026: the run rate, the deal stack, and the power-bound horizon
Frontier pretraining budgets crossed the half billion mark in 2025 and are heading toward one to three billion dollars per model by 2027, with cluster power, not GPUs, now the binding constraint on the next order of magnitude.
Frontier model training compute scaled at roughly 4x to 5x per year between 2018 and 2024, sat near 10x per year for the leading lab releases, and now confronts a deceleration driven by power, capital, and data, not by silicon. Epoch AI puts GPT-4 near 2e25 FLOPs at a roughly 80 million dollar training cost, Claude 3.5 Sonnet near 3e25, a...