AI costs surpass staff salaries at some companies: Here’s why

Uber's Chief Technology Officer burnt through his entire 2026 AI budget before the year was well underway, not on hardware or headcount, but on token costs alone. It is an extreme case, but not an isolated one, and it points to a shift now playing out across corporate IT departments worldwide.

Nvidia applied deep learning Vice President Bryan Catanzaro told Axios that for his team the cost of compute has already surpassed the cost of employing people. That inversion where processing power costs more than the workers using it would have seemed unlikely even two years ago. 

The bragging has started too. Swan AI CEO Amos Bar-Joseph posted publicly about his Anthropic bill going viral on LinkedIn, framing it as a badge of honour. "We're building the first autonomous business scaling with intelligence, not headcount," he wrote. Whether that trade-off proves sound is a question his investors will eventually need answered.

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, a 13.5 percent increase from 2025, according to research firm Gartner. The growth is being driven by AI infrastructure, software and cloud services covering everything from large-scale model deployments to the cost of individual AI subscriptions at the enterprise level.

That growth rate reflects genuine organisational appetite. But appetite and accountability are two different things, and the latter is arriving on schedule at quarterly earnings calls everywhere.

"The tone is shifting a bit more into what is the true value of a worker, human or digital?" said Brad Owens, vice president of digital labour strategy at Asymbl, a workforce orchestration firm. It is a question that boards and shareholders are beginning to ask in the same breath as productivity metrics and margin targets.

The rivalry among these AI labs is compounding the complexity. According to an investor at OpenAI speaking with Axios, Codex is considered more economical with tokens compared to Claude Code, which can affect enterprise expenditure if the cost burden increases further. Additionally, Anthropic has already changed its price structure due to growing demand.