Research firm Exponential View's report shows that revenue from artificial intelligence has reached a critical point, indicating that technology companies investing hundreds of billions of dollars in this field may be economically sustainable. Excluding China, the global AI sales revenue of hyperscale cloud service providers and emerging cloud service providers reached US$25 billion, surpassing the industry's estimated depreciation costs associated with data center and chip investments by US$21 billion for the second consecutive quarter. This milestone shows that AI companies' revenue is starting to be sufficient to cover their capital expenditure costs, but profit margins are still slim. Depreciation costs still consume more than two-thirds of revenue, leaving little buffer space to cover other costs such as electricity, labor, and finance. “At present, the economic account makes sense for the time being,” the report said, “but the room for fault tolerance is very narrow.”

Research firm Exponential View's report shows that revenue from artificial intelligence has reached a critical point, indicating that technology companies investing hundreds of billions of dollars in this field may be economically sustainable. Excluding China, the global AI sales revenue of hyperscale cloud service providers and emerging cloud service providers reached US$25 billion, surpassing the industry's estimated depreciation costs associated with data center and chip investments by US$21 billion for the second consecutive quarter. This milestone shows that AI companies' revenue is starting to be sufficient to cover their capital expenditure costs, but profit margins are still slim. Depreciation costs still consume more than two-thirds of revenue, leaving little buffer space to cover other costs such as electricity, labor, and finance. “At present, the economic account makes sense for the time being,” the report said, “but the room for fault tolerance is very narrow.”