The Economics of AI: Who Pays, Who Profits, and Who Scales?

Behind every artificial intelligence (AI) interaction sits an expensive physical and commercial stack—from GPUs and high-speed networking to data centers, electricity, cooling, cloud capacity, model licensing, and the specialist infrastructure needed to operate it. The cost of this infrastructure is distributed across hyperscalers, enterprises, governments, telecom operators, data-center providers, cloud customers, and ultimately consumers. And while the cost of using AI is falling rapidly at th