The AI industry has generated $110 billion in real revenue: growth rates three times higher than the internet.
Analysts have summarized the year for the global artificial intelligence economy, and the numbers are impressive. After eliminating double counting, the real revenue of the AI industry over the last 12 months reached $110 billion. At the same time, the current annual run rate is already $175 billion — meaning the industry is growing about three times faster than the adoption of mobile technology or the internet during their peak years.
The key accounting principle: each dollar is counted only once. For example, $1 spent on Claude is recorded once, even if part of that amount later goes to Amazon or another infrastructure provider. The metric is measured by end-customer spending, not by revenue along the entire supply chain. Excluded from the calculation are China, the internal AI economy, advertising effects, consulting, and system integration.
Growth Rate and Corporate Penetration
The pace of revenue generation has sharply accelerated: each new $1 billion in revenue now appears in less than two days, compared to 180 days in 2023. Corporate AI has moved beyond pilot projects, but deep, company-wide implementation is still in its early stages. Mentions of AI on earnings calls reached 31% of tracked S&P 500 companies. However, only 20% of them made quantitative statements about the technology's impact on their business. This indicates that a measurable, concrete effect is currently confirmed by only a minority of firms.
Infrastructure Economics and Price Elasticity
The economics of infrastructure deserve special attention. Revenue from cloud giants currently roughly covers the depreciation of AI infrastructure, but the economics of GPUs heavily depend on the assumption of a six-year lifespan. Meanwhile, the rest of the AI infrastructure is modeled over 14 years.
An interesting conclusion concerns token prices. A decrease in cost does not automatically reduce revenue: every 10% reduction in token price leads to a 12-18% increase in its consumption. This means that demand for AI appears elastic — a price drop expands usage faster than the cost declines.
The main constraints for further scaling are identified as electricity availability and the cost of data centers. These factors will restrain the growth of the AI economy in the future. The team worked on these calculations for several months.
Expert opinion: The numbers confirm that AI is not a speculative bubble, but a genuinely growing sector with fundamental demand. However, the key risk is infrastructure limitations: without breakthroughs in energy and data center cooling, current growth rates could hit a physical ceiling within the next 2-3 years.