Companies told us AI would replace human workers and cut costs. Turns out the math doesn’t work. An Nvidia VP just confirmed that compute costs for his team exceed what they pay their employees. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. And a startup CEO ran up a $113,000 monthly AI bill, with a four-person team.
This episode breaks down exactly why AI is costing companies more than the humans they laid off, what “tokenmaxxing” is and why engineers are doing it, and whether any of this spending is actually returning anything. Because at some point the ROI question stops being awkward and starts being a board-level emergency.
As an NVIDIA VP I assume he’s rich enough to casually walk away from the mess while tossing a lit match over his shoulder.
Nvidia isn’t actually losing money, they’re selling GPUs to the companies that sell the compute back to them, so the effective outcome is still profit for Nvidia. They seem smart enough to have a down ramp from all this.
Nah, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that 99% of people/companies/businesses follow the “if I made money yesterday, and I made money today, I’ll make money forever” rule. Greed is fundamentally short-sighted.
Sure, especially when they let shareholders have a say, who don’t care about the long-term viability of a company, just short-term profits. They can always sell.
Yet Nvidia isn’t doing things like that as egregiously. The other tech giants fire, they hire.