On August 30, multiple foreign media sources reported that, according to an AI industry research report by British bank Barclays, for every $100 in revenue generated by AI model companies, roughly $35 to $40 is directed to the three dominant cloud giants—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—as fees for inference computing power. Cloud service providers can secure an operating profit of about $10 to $20 from this, boasting operating profit margins as high as 35% to 45%.
In the meantime, the profit margins of AI labs' paid inference services have soared, climbing from the low double digits in 2025 to 50% to 65% or even more in 2026, with adjusted gross margins witnessing a year-on-year increase of 30 to 50 percentage points. Barclays analysts are of the opinion that actual profit margins might exceed the estimates in the report. However, as competition for cutting-edge models heats up and the supply of computing power expands, profit margins are anticipated to gradually taper off.