Top 10% of firms account for 99.5% of AI inference spend, Apollo data shows
SumitGup · x · 2026-10-25
Apollo Chief Economist data (via Ramp AI Index) shows the AI boom is far narrower than commonly admitted:
- The top 10% of firms account for 99.5% of model-serving/inference spend, 99% of neocloud spend, and 95.6% of OpenAI and Anthropic billings
- Cloud computing (95.7%) and paid ads (91.9%) show similarly extreme concentration
- The buildout is circular: 80.4% of the heaviest AI spenders (top 1%) are backed by venture capital rather than their own revenue, versus 13.1% for median spenders
The takeaway: a handful of companies constitute the entire AI trade.
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