The AI bill is growing: Billions pour in, and someone has to pay

This week's business news about AI has one common theme: it's expensive, and the bill is being passed along. The question is, to whom.

The billions in the engine room

At Meta, third-quarter revenue came in higher than expected, but the stock still fell almost 7 percent because the AI push is costly and the company is planning new shares. The drop spread to the rest of the tech sector. Microsoft expects to spend $175 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 and is simultaneously offering up to 60,000 employees the chance to leave voluntarily.

At Anthropic, the company behind Claude, the money is coming from banks and investors. Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone have committed to financing chips and networking equipment worth $63 billion, with delivery starting in 2027. The financial statements show a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half, which according to Fortune is mostly due to non-cash accounting adjustments, while cash flow from operations is positive. Cost of sales reached $3.17 billion, and most of the increase is fees to cloud companies and partners.

At Samsung, the side effects show up elsewhere: record revenue, but losses in the consumer electronics division, where the mobile side is, according to unofficial estimates, being dragged down by rising memory prices. The AI boom, in other words, is making other products more expensive too.

Users feel it

The price is also becoming visible to ordinary users. OpenAI has capped how many paid ChatGPT accounts can be tied to the same card or device. OpenAI calls it a security measure, while The Decoder believes it hits people who switch between accounts. Elon Musk reportedly wrote that Grok's agent is unsustainably expensive to run, and some users say they are hitting their weekly limit faster. The post has not been directly verified, however.

For companies, the answer is more control. Anthropic has expanded Claude Enterprise with usage reports, short employee surveys and shared monthly budgets, so managers can see what AI costs and delivers.

Who wins from this?

The consulting firms are betting big. Cognizant has assembled more than 25,000 employees to deliver OpenAI technology to enterprise customers, about 11 days after a similar push for Google's Gemini. They want to profit from both horses. And usage is spreading: new figures from OpenAI show that ChatGPT is being used for more types of work than before.

Here the arrow points in a different direction than in the big financial statements. Mette Beck-Nielsen, CEO of Digital Dogme, doesn't believe Danish companies win by building their own large language models. It's a race discipline that requires sums like those above. Meanwhile, China's DeepSeek is reportedly about to raise around $15 billion, according to Bloomberg, just two days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove the company's technology.

What can you do?

Set a budget and keep track of what your AI subscriptions are actually used for, before more companies get the same caps and limits as private users. Also watch whether investors' patience holds as fourth-quarter earnings and Anthropic's possible IPO approach. According to Fortune, the timing is November, but this is not confirmed.