Token Prices Fall but H100 Rentals Hold Near $2.70/hr: a16z Charts AI's Jevons Effect
annbordetsky · x · 2026-10-13
A16z Growth shared a "Jevons" chart, using data compiled by Citadel Securities from Orn and Silicon Data: while the token price expenditure index kept sliding (from 1.7 to 1.1 since July), H100 GPU rental prices rebounded and held around $2.70/hr. Token and compute prices briefly declined together in May-June 2026, but compute has stayed robust even as tokens got cheaper — evidence that cheaper tokens expand compute demand. The shared take: the last 6 months were all about tokens, now it's all about compute, and that isn't going away anytime soon.
More from Venture
- Five Ways to Monetize Open-Weight LLMs, API Sales Lead — Terminator857 · 2026-10-13
- Study: AI-generated books flood Amazon self-publishing and crowd out human authors' sales — TuhinChakr · 2026-10-13
- Tolan's 100K+ subscribers are mostly 30-40s users outside the tech bubble — ajaymehta · 2026-10-13
- $250K in 2022 startup equity: ElevenLabs returned 820x, Cursor 725x vs S&P's 2.2x — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-13
- Bain: AI services to yield $1.8T of $6T needed by 2031 — Redditors see a high-speed rail-style overbuild — GinJockette · 2026-10-13
- Two GLP-1 drugs outearn OpenAI and Anthropic 2-to-1, a case for AI-driven R&D — Afinetheorem · 2026-10-13