The AI Spending vs. Price War Paradox: Why Billions in Capex Meet Falling Costs

The Big Idea

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek dropped a new coding model called V4 Flash last Friday that performs almost as well as Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.8 — at a fraction of the price. Axios called it "the latest sign that some of the smartest software on Earth is rapidly becoming a commodity." Meanwhile, the four largest hyperscalers in America have committed nearly $2.4 trillion to building the data centers that power these very models. You can spend $2.4 trillion building a factory...