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# OpenAI and Anthropic's inference costs are consuming half their revenue
- URL: https://adjacent.media/signals/openai-and-anthropics-inference-costs-are-consuming-half-their-revenue/
- Published: 2026-04-07T01:24:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-07T01:33:47.000Z
- Description: Both companies are projecting profitability to investors while obscuring a structural problem: computational costs to run their models post-training now exceed 50% of revenue, compressing margins to unsustainable levels at scale.
- Author: Jonathan Greene
- Tags: #signal, theme-ai, AI & ML, infrastructure

Source: [The Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-anthropic-ipo-finances-04b3cfb9?st=WEDf6p&reflink=article%5FcopyURL%5Fshare&ref=adjacent.media)

Both companies are projecting profitability to investors while obscuring a structural problem: computational costs to run their models post-training now exceed 50% of revenue, compressing margins to unsustainable levels at scale. This explains the simultaneous push for cheaper inference optimization, longer context windows to reduce repeat queries, and cache-heavy architectures—not as product features, but as operational necessity. The gap between board presentations and the physics of their cost structure suggests either a dramatic breakthrough in inference efficiency or a reset in pricing expectations within 18-24 months.