Companies face rising AI costs despite cheaper token prices

Several big companies spent far more on AI in 2026 than they expected, even though the cost per unit of AI processing had fallen sharply since 2023.

The problem was that employees used AI much more than before, and newer AI tools needed more computing power to complete each task. Uber ran out of its entire AI budget in just four months. Meta's employees used tens of trillions of AI processing units in a single month. Amazon created an internal competition to track AI use, but employees found ways to game the system.

Companies had pushed staff to adopt tools like Claude Code and Copilot, and treated heavy use as a sign of success. However, using more AI did not consistently produce better work.