[ic_fly2]

IBM might not have a data strategy or AI plan but he isn’t wrong on the inability to generate a profit.

A bit of napkin math: NVIDIA claims 0.4J per token for their latest generation 1GW plant with 80% utilisation can therefore produce 6.29 10^16 tokens a year.

There are ~10^14 tokens on the internet. ~10^19 tokens have been spoken by humans… so far.

[raincole]

> There are ~10^14 tokens on the internet.

Don't know what the source is, but it feels missing a few orders of magnitude. Surely it only counts text? I can't imagine there are only so few data on the internet if you count images and videos.

[lostmsu]

> ~10^14 tokens on the internet

Does that include image tokens? My bet is with image tokens you are off by at least 5 orders of magnitude for both.

[scotty79]

Images are not that big. Each text token is a multidimensional vector.

There were recent observations that rendering the text as an image and ingesting the image might actually be more efficient than using text embedding.

[senordevnyc]

I must be dense, why does this imply AI can't be profitable?

[mywittyname]

Tokens are, roughly speaking, how you pay for AI. So you can approximate revenue by multiplying tokens per year by the revenue for a token.

(6.29 10^16 tokens a year) * ($10 per 10^6 tokens)

= $6.29 10^11

= $629,000,000,000 per year in revenue

Per the article

> "It's my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that, because $8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said.

$629 billion is less than $800 billion. And we are talking raw revenue (not profit). So we are already in the red.

But it gets worse, that $10 per million tokens costs is for GPT-5.1, which is one of the most expensive models. And the costs don't account for input tokens, which are usually a tenth of the costs of output tokens. And using bulk API instead of the regular one halves costs again.

Realistic revenue projections for a data center are closer to sub $1 per million tokens, $70-150 billion per year. And this is revenue only.

To make profits at current prices, the chips need to increase in performance by some factor, and power costs need to fall by another factor. The combination of these factors need to be, at minimum, like 5x, but realistically need to be 50x.