Citigroup says enterprise AI user costs are dropping even as underlying compute prices hold up. Its usage-weighted token expenditures are down about 37.5% from the May peak, while NVIDIA Blackwell GPU rental rates have risen roughly 15.2% over the past three months. Citigroup attributes the unit-cost decline mainly to model selection, smart routing and inference-efficiency gains rather than GPU price cuts. The shift suggests AI commercialization is moving from raw compute scaling toward higher u

Citigroup says enterprise AI user costs are dropping even as underlying compute prices hold up. Its usage-weighted token expenditures are down about 37.5% from the May peak, while NVIDIA Blackwell GPU rental rates have risen roughly 15.2% over the past three months. Citigroup attributes the unit-cost decline mainly to model selection, smart routing and inference-efficiency gains rather than GPU price cuts. The shift suggests AI commercialization is moving from raw compute scaling toward higher utilization—firms can lower per-call costs by invoking lighter models for simpler tasks despite tight compute supply. NVIDIA has demonstrated quantization and other optimizations on Blackwell that materially raise inference throughput and reduce hardware occupancy, highlighting software and model-layer improvements as a key lever to cut inference costs.