According to a Barclays report, for every $100 in revenue generated by AI model companies, approximately $35 to $40 flows to the three major cloud service giants—Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—as inference computing power fees. Cloud service providers can earn an operating profit of $10 to $20 from this, with an operating profit margin of 35% to 45%. The profit margin for AI labs' paid inference business is expected to rise from the low double digits in 2025 to 50% to 65% or even higher in 2026, with adjusted gross margins increasing by 30 to 50 percentage points year-on-year. Analysts believe that actual profit margins may be higher, but as competition for cutting-edge models intensifies and computing power supply increases, profit margins are expected to gradually decline.
