The price of AI is crashing faster than the rate of Moore's Law, report suggests
- ID
- 30263
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 30 Sep 2026, 8:40 PM
- Fetched
- 30 Sep 2026, 8:55 PM
- Provider
- Tom's Hardware
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/the-price-of-ai-is-crashing-faster-than-the-rate-of-moores-law-report-suggests-intelligence-costs-are-in-freefall-outpacing-comparative-technologies-like-compute-dna-sequencing-and-lithium-batteries
- Source URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 30 Sep 2026, 8:55 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnerssaas_foundersvibe_coders
What happened
Epoch AI's report, covered by Tom's Hardware, claims the price of AI has fallen by thousands of times in recent years — roughly 50% cheaper every quarter, or about 13x cheaper per year. That pace outruns lithium batteries, DNA sequencing, and even compute riding Moore's Law. The article also notes that vendor loyalty and subscription schemes have limited appeal when prices can fall this fast.
Why it matters
If inference really is deflating ~13x a year, any pricing model that assumes today's per-token or per-seat API cost for a 12-month horizon is wrong by an order of magnitude — that flips build-vs-buy math toward 'buy now, revisit in a quarter' and argues against multi-year vendor commitments or self-hosting to chase cost. Treat the 13x figure as a claim from one report, not a law, and check your own invoice trend before re-architecting.
Discussion angle
If per-unit AI cost keeps dropping ~50% a quarter, which parts of your product should be priced on value rather than passed-through token cost — and which subscriptions are you currently locked into that you'd renegotiate?