AI is still booming. But the business model is changing |
AI is still booming. The business model is what's changing.
Developers drove the AI boom. Now their heavy usage is pushing companies to rethink how they charge
Photo by Wally Skalij/Getty Images
Big Tech told investors this week it will spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, likely the largest corporate buildout in history. The market mostly celebrated.
Investors may be cheering the shift underneath, not just the spending. After years of free tiers, flat-rate enterprise contracts, and venture capital absorbing the difference, the industry is renegotiating its unit economics. Customers are about to feel it.
Microsoft $MSFT's GitHub Copilot will move on June 1 from a flat-rate coding-assistant model toward usage-based billing tied to tokens, which are the units of data (usually a few characters of text) processed by AI. The change ends what was effectively all-you-can-eat AI-assisted coding. Anthropic shifted enterprise customers to per-seat plans with usage billed on top, and last month cut off third-party tools that were running $200-a-month consumer subscriptions through autonomous AI agents around the clock, consuming thousands of dollars in compute.
OpenAI's head of ChatGPT has said publicly that unlimited AI plans probably no longer........