AI costs are now outpacing human labor costs at big tech companies. Uber's CTO already blew through his entire 2026 AI budget in 2025. It cost more than the human workers in that department while tartup founders are bragging about their AI bills as a badge of seriousness. VCs are asking about token spend as a signal of commitment. The macro number: worldwide IT spending is expected to be up 13.5% this year to over $6 trillion. Most of the incremental spend is going straight to token costs and enterprise contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. The original premise was simple: AI cuts costs. Replace expensive humans with cheaper compute. The actual pattern emerging is the opposite. The companies most committed to AI are spending more. High token usage has become a signal of AI seriousness. Two possible interpretations: One: AI is delivering productivity gains faster than expected and the ROI already justifies the cost. Uber's CTO blew his 2026 budget in 2025 because AI was producing results worth more than what was budgeted. Two: AI has become a competitive arms race where you have to keep spending just to stay relevant, regardless of near-term ROI. Either way, the beneficiaries are the same: the companies selling the tokens. OpenAI, Anthropic and the infrastructure beneath them are capturing every dollar of this spending surge.