Inference Got Cheap. Renegotiate Everything.

For eighteen months the story has been the same. AI is expensive, and getting more expensive. That story has inverted. The price of using AI, not building it, is collapsing, and most of your vendors are quietly hoping you do not notice.In this weekday brief, Stephen Forte teaches the single most important distinction in AI economics, walks through four pieces of evidence in eleven days that the price floor is cracking, and gives you three concrete moves for the contracts already sitting in your legal folder.What you'll learn:Training vs. inference. Training is medical school. Inference is every patient visit for the next forty years. Inference is north of ninety percent of what you actually pay.The chip split. Google announced TPU 8t for training and TPU 8i for inference on April 22. Nvidia, AMD, and AWS Trainium/Inferentia are all moving the same direction. F1 cars vs. delivery vans.The Nebius/Eigen deal. On May 1, Nebius paid $643M for a startup that does one thing: makes AI run inference faster and cheaper. Three months earlier they bought Tavily for $275M. Same theme.DeepSeek V4 (April 24). An open-weight Chinese model claims to close the gap with frontier reasoning at a fraction of the cost. Western vendors will discount or explain why they aren't.Anthropic at $900B. A $50B round only pencils if inference economics work at industrial scale. That is the bet.Models are splitting too. Frontier models are neurosurgeons. Distilled models (Haikus, Minis, Nanos) and mixture-of-experts architectures are nurse practitioners — 95% of the visits at 10% of the cost.Three moves for this week:Pull every AI vendor contract signed in the last eighteen months. Find the inference pricing line (per token, per request, per seat).Ask your CIO: what percentage of our AI workload could run on a smaller or distilled model? The honest answer is north of seventy percent.Open the renegotiation conversation now. Not at renewal. Vendors fighting for share will move on price.The training story made the headlines. The inference story makes the budget. For eighteen months you have been the seller's customer. As of last week, you are the buyer.Sources:Bloomberg — Nebius Agrees to Buy Startup That Makes AI Run Faster, Cheaper (May 1, 2026)TechCrunch — Google Cloud launches two new AI chips to compete with Nvidia (April 22, 2026)TechCrunch — DeepSeek previews new AI model that closes the gap with frontier models (April 24, 2026)Bloomberg — Anthropic Weighs Funding Offers at Over $900 Billion Valuation (April 29, 2026)