The AI Utility Bill
−4.0%
since Oct 3
The idea
I think AI subscriptions have quietly become a monthly utility bill, and the recurring payments are the real story. This basket owns the platforms collecting that money directly, the clouds billing the compute behind every subscription, the enterprise sellers charging per seat for AI, and the usage-metered software that earns more as AI workloads grow. It stays concentrated in the biggest collectors across these groups, keeps a cash reserve to add on weak quarters, and is built around a one-to-two-year window for that recurring revenue to show up clearly in earnings.
What it owns
- These companies collect monthly recurring charges directly from consumers and businesses for AI-powered services and features. · MicrosoftIt charges per seat for Copilot across Office and GitHub, making AI a recurring monthly charge companies pay to keep working., AlphabetIt collects subscription revenue from both consumers and businesses through Gemini subscriptions and Google Cloud charges., AppleIt takes a cut of nearly every AI subscription sold through iPhones, collecting a toll on the growing monthly AI utility bill without building the AI itself., DuolingoIt demonstrates consumer willingness to pay extra every month for AI-powered features through its Max subscription tier.27%
- Every AI subscription runs on rented computing infrastructure that gets billed monthly, regardless of who sells the subscription to the end user. · AmazonAWS sends the largest monthly compute bills in the industry, providing the underlying infrastructure that every AI subscription relies on., OracleIt has locked in massive multi-year AI cloud contracts, securing recurring compute billing through contracted backlog., CoreWeaveIt rents GPUs by the hour and month, providing the raw computing capacity underneath every AI subscription in the market., Nebius GroupIt collects the same kind of monthly compute bills as larger cloud providers, with more room to grow from a smaller revenue base.26%
- Companies pay recurring per-employee or per-user fees for AI tools layered into software they already subscribe to. · PalantirIt sells AI platforms as recurring subscriptions to enterprises and governments, with the fastest revenue growth in the enterprise AI seat category., ServiceNowIt charges enterprises more per seat for AI-powered tiers, turning artificial intelligence into a bigger recurring software bill., SalesforceIt prices Agentforce as a per-seat and per-use add-on to its existing software subscriptions, layering AI onto recurring enterprise bills., SAPIt is moving its customer base to cloud subscriptions while charging extra for AI on top, expanding the recurring bill in two directions.23%
- Software platforms billed by consumption generate larger monthly bills as AI workloads grow, similar to a utility meter spinning faster. · SnowflakeIt bills customers by usage, so every AI workload run on its platform results in a larger monthly bill., DatadogIt gets paid more as customers run more workloads, and AI applications generate the data sprawl and infrastructure complexity it monitors., MongoDBIts Atlas platform is metered by usage, so new AI applications built on it generate larger monthly database bills.14%
- Cash10%