AI's Compute Costs Shatter Software Economics Forever

OpenAI and Anthropic's latest financials reveal a brutal truth: AI is not software. With OpenAI projecting $121 billion in compute spend by 2028 and inference costs running 15 times higher than training, the industry's celebrated high-margin model is collapsing under industrial-era physics. The strategic divide is sharpening. Anthropic targets enterprise clients for predictable revenue, while OpenAI's 800 million weekly users serve as a data infrastructure play. Whoever bends the cost curve fastest through hardware efficiency will dominate. The rest face margin compression and consolidation.