Up the Stack: How AI's Escape from the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-In

Arvind Narayanan

Jul 09, 2026

By Arvind Narayanan and Akash Kapur

Our goal in this essay is to move beyond the debate over whether AI is a bubble. We do so in two ways: clearly separating current financials from the question of who captures value in the long run, and recognizing that the labs are not confined to be model providers. They can migrate up the stack and are already aggressively doing so. This will likely allow them to escape the commodity trap but raises new concerns — customer lock-in and reduced competition.

Akash Kapur is a visiting fellow at Princeton and a senior fellow at New America. He is no relation to Sayash Kapoor.

As leading AI companies continue to invest massively in capacity and race toward blockbuster IPOs, serious questions linger about their business models. How will these companies — along with the vast ecosystem of chipmakers, hyperscalers, and infrastructure partners that depends on them — recoup the estimated $4–8 trillion projected to be invested in AI infrastructure by the early 2030s?

The current conversation splits between critics and boosters. Critics point to mounting losses, the gap between capex and revenue, and reports about the leading labs’ massive cash burn. Boosters cite accelerating rapid revenue growth, enterprise adoption, and milestones like Anthropic’s first profitable quarter. Each camp has a valid point. But both are looking in the wrong place — the same quarterly statements, the same short-term view of an industry that remains in flux.

In recent months, we have been thinking about the nature and sustainability of the AI business, and we’ve landed in a different place than most of the existing commentary. AI companies today earn much of their revenue by charging for inference, but the conditions of frontier inference make this an unusually difficult business to maintain. Models are largely undifferentiated, the leading labs operate with similar capital structures, switching costs are low, and prices can be adjusted freely. All of this appears to set up the conditions for a commodity trap that would pose real challenges to the task of building high-margin or even profitable businesses.

At the same time, we believe that the industry remains in a transitional stage, and that its structure will look very different when it matures. Drawing on both historical evidence and economic theory, we argue that competition in this equilibrium is likely to push the price of model inference toward the marginal cost of producing tokens, leaving little room for durable profits at the model layer. This does not mean, however, that the business of AI is inherently unviable. The same analysis suggests a path forward for AI labs, and leads to the central argument of our paper:

The labs’ most likely path to durable profitability runs not through the foundation layers (chips, datacenters, models) that have thus far accounted for the bulk of investments, but higher up the stack, through a mix of vertical integration, embedded enterprise deployments, and the deliberate construction of switching costs and other “moats”.

The labs’ strategies to capture value by moving up the stack, many borrowed from the playbook of enterprise software, have already begun. Beyond the sustainability of the current AI ecosystem, they raise questions of broader societal concern — about competition, innovation, and the overall distribution of economic and political power. The public discussion over AI so far has been marked by a somewhat paradoxical dichotomy: anxiety about monopolistic concentration and runaway market power, yet a reality of low switching costs and relatively interchangeable models that seems to belie those fears. But if we are right that the labs will increasingly move higher up the stack, then concerns about concentration and competition are worth taking seriously now, rather than after the effects of lock-in start to materialize. We return to these broader issues in the conclusion — and in a forthcoming paper that dives deeper into many of the topics covered in this post.

Historical analysis: the infrastructure layer overwhelmingly fails to capture the value that it creates

The AI as Normal Technology framework is committed to drawing lessons, when applicable, from past transformative technologies. We think AI is subject to many of the same dynamics related to investment, competition, and value capture that have shaped previous waves of technological innovation. As part of our research, we therefore examined the puzzle of AI value capture, and the labs’ likely response to it, through a broader historical lens.

We looked at six historical instances of capital-intensive infrastructure industries (railroads, electricity, telecom and fiber, cloud computing, semiconductor manufacturing, and commercial aviation). We believe that AI today has many infrastructure-like characteristics: massive capital requirements; low marginal cost; a commodity product that is somewhat decoupled from the applications that ultimately create value. This makes infrastructure a notoriously tough business to be in.

But at the same time, AI is software, and the software business has historically been lucrative, with exceptionally high margins. The industry has software-margin ambitions. Thus, we also surveyed the value-add and lock-in strategies of software-as-a-service, and analyzed whether AI can replicate these. Our thesis is that AI companies’ sustainability and value-capture largely turns on how successfully they can migrate from the first set of infrastructural properties toward the second enterprise-software ones.

Broadly, we identified three instructive lessons for AI from our historical analysis. First, infrastructure providers rarely capture the value they create. Across railroads, electricity, telecom, and airlines, the firms that built capacity were eventually competed, regulated, or commoditized into thin margins. In many cases, they were destroyed outright. During the telecom and fiber buildout of the late 1990s, capacity exploded 186,000-fold in seven years, prices crashed, and roughly $2 trillion in market capitalization was erased. The value generated by the infrastructure primarily accrued to industries and applications built on top of it. Commercial aviation has destroyed investor capital for eight decades, because typical net margins are 2–4%, often below the cost of capital — even as businesses of all stripes benefited from a globalized economy.

We believe that AI, at least in its current hyperscaler form, risks falling into the same commodity trap that has bedeviled so many previous infrastructure builders. Carlota Perez has theorized the paradoxical phenomenon that the builders who create infrastructure during the “installation period” rarely survive to capture the value it creates.

Second, enterprise software is not subject to this pattern, and it escapes the trap through a specific and reproducible set of mechanisms. Where infrastructure firms have struggled, enterprise software has sustained gross margins of 75% or more for decades. It does so by combining three properties that infrastructure businesses lack: zero marginal cost of reproduction, deep switching costs, and non-ephemeral value that allows fixed buildout costs to be amortized over decades. The AI labs’ lock-in strategies are best understood as attempts to import these structural properties of software into AI.

Finally, two partial exceptions reveal what it may take for AI to beat the historical odds. Two infrastructure businesses — cloud computing and chip fabrication — have managed to escape the commodity trap. Cloud acquired software-like properties (managed-services lock-in, egress fees, committed-spend agreements) and TSMC achieved a near-monopoly position in leading-edge fabrication. These cases matter because they show what escape from the commodity trap actually requires. Capital-intensive industries can sustain durable margins, but only by either becoming functionally software or achieving market concentration.

Why we think charging for model inference won’t allow recouping infrastructure investment

As noted, critics of the AI buildout point to the labs’ current losses and boosters to early profits, but both are committing the same error: mistaking the transitional period for the equilibrium. We are still in the early years of the AI transformation of the economy, and naive extrapolation is flawed. In equilibrium, both the supply and demand side will look very different than they do today.

A few examples of the fluctuating fortunes of the AI labs so far: A massive and speculative infrastructure buildout that was arguably ahead of demand; the Deepseek moment during which open-weight models almost caught up to the frontier; a surge in demand as companies embraced AI agents, often accompanied by irrational and wasteful practices such as token leaderboards, leading to a so-called era of token scarcity; and, most recently, a renewed push for a competitive open-source ecosystem as companies reconsider their spending on frontier models.

These ups and downs have many parallels in the historical case studies mentioned above. The railways at first saw a speculative frenzy (the railway mania of the 1840s in Britain). In America, over time, demand exceeded capacity, resulting in estimated direct and indirect returns of 15% per annum on railroad capital through 1860 — enormous for the era. But as the network matured, capacity caught up to demand, competition squeezed margins, and many railroad companies went bankrupt.

Thus, to better forecast the labs’ long-term prospects, it is helpful to step back from the year-to-year and quarter-to-quarter swings in financials (and narratives), and ground our analysis in economic theory. A key concept is the Bertrand paradox: this says that when firms sell a homogeneous product (frontier-model inference), price competition will force them to sell each unit (token) at the marginal cost of producing it.

The theoretical analysis is important because the question of how well the historical record predicts the AI industry’s fortunes is contested. For example, our colleague Mihir Kshirsagar identifies regulation as the main reason why railroad, electric and telecom companies were unable to extract the surplus generated by their infrastructure, rather than viewing it as an inherent consequence of their economics. Thus, the theory gives us an additional reason to expect a margin squeeze. Although the theoretical paradox is easy to escape in practice, we believe that model inference contains an unusually pure version of the conditions that produce the paradox:

Models are largely undifferentiated. At least three companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have managed to stay on the frontier and produce models that behave and perform similarly to each other. Besides, for an increasing fraction of use cases, frontier performance is not necessary, and open-weight models are good enough. Furthermore, the near-equivalence of models is readily observed or perceived by customers, because there are hundreds of benchmarks on which models are regularly evaluated and frontier models all tend to cluster near the top.

For a revealing contrast from another industry, Apple famously sustains high margins by escaping this aspect of Bertrand competition. It resists competing on objectively observable dimensions of performance (gigahertz, megapixels), instead advertising outcomes and ineffable qualities (“it just works”) and creates strong brand differentiation.

The vendors all have similar capital costs. AI knowledge diffuses rapidly; the major paradigms of model development — model scaling, inference scaling, reinforcement learning, and so on — have all proceeded in near-lockstep. So to produce a token at a given output quality, the labs all spend similar amounts on training. In a hypothetical future where the frontier doesn’

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