AI Value Capture

May 01, 2026

∙ Paid

A 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.

This flood of demand is driven by end users enjoying a huge return on investment (ROI) from consuming tokens, and this demand growth is arguably only in its early innings. This year Anthropic’s ARR has exploded from $9B to over $44B today, their gross margins on their inference infrastructure have increased from 38% to over 70% over the same period.

This rapid pace of AI adoption has created value across the stack, but the unique phenomenon is that the AI labs are capturing all the value now, from almost none last year.

End users are enjoying a productivity bonanza - tasks that used to take tens of person-hours costing thousands of dollars can now be accomplished in minutes with a just a few dollars’ worth of tokens. This huge surge in revenue and margins is because the value of tokens being created is dramatically improving businesses. For example, SemiAnalysis has reached as high as $10.95 million dollar annual spend rate on Anthropic Claude tokens, but the value we derive allows us to outcompete all our competitors and gain market share.

New chips such as Blackwells can generate 30x more tokens per second while running frontier workloads today vs Hoppers a year ago, and ASICs such as TPUv7 and Trainium 3 show similar improvements. Inference providers such as Fireworks, Baseten, Fal, margins are widening while their revenue trends are in hyper growth.

Even parts of the hardware stacks have repriced, with memory prices having gone up 6x in the past year. Neocloud GPU rental pricing is surging as well, up with 1-year H100 rental contract prices up 40% from the bottom in October 2025.

There are two firms in the industry with incredible pricing power that haven’t moved much though. TSMC and Nvidia have not reacted to the recent boom in value generation of AI models.

In this article, we will explore where value from AI is accruing - from end users to inference providers, Neoclouds as well as hardware providers. We will unveil how TSMC and Nvidia are now venting vast value into every vertical of the ecosystem.

Finally - we introduce a new framework: the “One Chart to Rule Them All” that explores GPU Rental Economics and analyzes whom among the end users, the Neoclouds/Hyperscalers and the AI System suppliers are capturing the most value in the AI ecosystem.

Source: SemiAnalysis AI TCO Model

AI Value Profit Pools

From 2023-2025, all the value in AI was captured by the infrastructure layer. Nvidia had their first blockbuster earnings call in May 2023 and jumped 25% after hours, officially marking the start of the AI trade. In 2024, Vistra and GE Vernova were two of the top performing stocks in the S&P 500 (+265% and +146% respectively) as everyone realized power was becoming the key bottleneck. In 2025, memory stole the show, with SanDisk, Western Digital, Seagate, and Micron all posting 200%+ gains on the year. These are all sweeping generalizations of course and many other infra names have significantly outperformed thanks to increased AI capex. Those interested in all the granular details should subscribe to our institutional products.

During this same period, gross margins for all the model creators and inference providers were famously bad. For most, the actual utility of AI still only amounted to slightly better Google search locked behind a chat interface and Studio Ghibli style selfies. Skeptics loudly proclaimed that there was simply no way AI could ever deliver on the trillions of planned capex.

Agentic AI Has Changed the Game

The world changed in December 2025, when Agentic AI began to really work. SemiAnalysis has written and talked extensively about our Claude Code usage, but it is important to emphasize that agentic AI is no longer limited to just coding. Our analysts are using agents every day to convert excel models into dashboards, create charts for all our notes, build financial models and analyze company earnings, and much more. These are all tasks that either 1) we simply wouldn’t have been able to do before or 2) would’ve previously taken our junior analysts many hours, taking them away from far more value added tasks.

The table below shows a handful of real examples from our own workflows, comparing token spend against what the equivalent human labor would have cost:

Source: SemiAnalysis

Annualized token spend at SemiAnalysis is already ~30% of employee compensation and we’re consuming just under 5B tokens per month per employee (over 5x more than Meta!). This is power law distributed though, so there are team members running over 100B tokens a month. It’s obvious that this is still just the beginning, and that all white-collar enterprises will soon embrace agentic AI.

Within the past few months, the value of each token has clearly increased. We estimate that the true blended price per million tokens for running Opus 4.7 on agentic tasks at $0.99 despite the sticker price being $5/$25 per MTok. Agentic workloads have extremely high input-to-output ratios (our Claude Code usage has a ratio of about 300:1) and high cache hit rates (90%+). Because cached input tokens only cost $0.50/MTok, most of the tokens end up in the cheapest tier. We walk through the full methodology here.

When framed this way, it’s no wonder why Anthropic ARR has exploded from $9B to potentially $44B+ YTD.

Tokens Are Getting Cheaper to Produce

At the same time, the cost of producing each token has plummeted. This is the largest driver of value accretion to inference providers, and it is a key reason for the sharp increase in margins at large AI Labs.

Cost of production for token has fallen sharply because increases in accelerator pricing generation-over-generation have been more than offset by much higher throughput (tokens/sec/gpu). Average blended price per million tokens has fallen dramatically over the past few months, agentic workloads are inherently multi-turn with longer input/output ratios and higher cache hit rates, but inference margins have gone up from 70% in the same time frame. For in-depth estimates on true blended price per million tokens, token production volumes, and gross margins for all the major models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and more, see our Tokenomics model.

InferenceX remains the best benchmark for tracking real-world inference performance over time for open source models given both hardware and software improvements.

The following chart shows throughput vs interactivity for B300s running DeepSeek R1 on 8k input tokens to generate 1k output tokens. The top line reflects token throughput with wideEP + disagg + MTP, the middle reflects wideEP + disagg and he lowest line is without any of the three software optimizations. The gap is startling with the same B300 able to yield~1k, ~8k, and ~14k tokens/sec/gpu on the same hardware. One can 14x throughput with software improvements alone.

Source: SemiAnalysis InferenceX

If you factor in hardware improvements as well, then the difference is even more pronounced. The most optimized GB300 NVL72 configuration achieves ~17x higher throughput than the most optimized H100 configuration in FP8. If we switch to FP4, which Hopper doesn’t natively support, the difference jumps to 32x. Remember that the total cost of ownership per GPU is only ~70% higher for GB300 vs H100.

Source: SemiAnalysis InferenceX

Model Provider Margins Will Continue to Increase

Many were surprised when Anthropic released Opus 4.5 at a price of $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens in late November 2025. Previous Opus models such as 4 and 4.1 (released May 2025 and August 2025 respectively) were priced 3x higher at $15/$75.

However, we think Anthropic’s margins have actually increased on Opus tokens despite the lower ASP thanks to software improvements across Trainium and Nvidia GPUs as well as replacing Hoppers with Blackwells.

Anthropic’s margin expansion so far has come from cost reductions; they can generate the same tokens for cheaper. Despite the Opus price cut, their ASP/token has also actually gone up because most of the volume shifted from Sonnet to Opus.

Even if XPU providers start dramatically raising prices to better capture their share of the throughput improvements, Anthropic still has another lever to pull to further expand margins: they can continue shifting volume to more expensive SKUs.

As mentioned earlier, the gap between the price of a frontier-level token vs the economic value of the work that can be produced by said token is the largest it’s ever been. Anthropic can either re-up the price of the base Opus family or introduce new products. We already saw the latter with Opus fast being priced 6x higher than regular Opus, and Mythos being announced at $25/$125 (5x regular Opus pricing). Both these SKUs are higher margin than regular Opus, yet the most AI-pilled businesses are still more than happy to pay the increased prices because the productivity gains outweigh the cost. If Anthropic let us pay $150/$750 for Mythos fast, we would.

The age of low gross margins for frontier model providers is over. Real agentic AI has permanently increased the market-clearing price per token, and there’s no going back.

Why Model Provider Profits Won’t Get Competed Away

The most obvious argument for why the labs won’t be able to capture higher margins despite increased utility per token is competition. However, we don’t think this is how things will play out for two reasons.

First, it’s become clear that the frontier model maintains pricing power. Regardless of what the benchmarks may say, open-source models are still noticeably worse than their closed source counterparts for real knowledge work, and there’s no reason to believe the gap will close any time soon. Kimi K2.6 ($0.95/$4) exerts very little downward pressure on Opus pricing.

Second, compute constraints means that no single frontier lab will be able to serve the entire market. Anthropic is already beginning to alienate large swathes of the market today by locking Claude Code behind a $100+/month subscription and blocking third party harnesses like OpenClaw. Token demand will far outstrip supply for the foreseeable future, which means any lab capable of providing true frontier quality will be able to charge based on the economic value delivered by the token rather than competing away each other’s margins.

Agentic AI Hits the Market, but TSMC and Nvidia Haven’t Flinched

Despite the repeated emphasis on agentic AI during Jensen’s most recent GTC keynote, Nvidia and TSMC still have not fully internalized how transformative the past few months have been for token economics. We already saw Nvidia underestimate Blackwell’s performance-per-dollar improvements based on Jensen’s reaction to InferenceX, and it now appears they have also underestimated how quickly frontier tokens would appreciate in value.

Nvidia is still operating within a framework shaped by prior assumptions, where the willingness to pay per unit of compute declines over time. That assumption no longer holds. The market has shifted materially, driven by the explosion of agentic workloads and a sharp increase in token consumption per workflow. Demand is no longer linear. It is compounding.

Demand, however, continues to accelerate. Anthropic’s ARR has reportedly reached $44B+, up from $30B in our last update, while open-weight models such as GLM and Kimi are expanding the addressable compute base. Capital raises across AI labs and Neoclouds are translating directly into incremental GPU deployments.

At the same time,

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