AI Splurge Hinges on 1% of Customers as Spending Growth Stalls

Corporate card company Ramp says a mere 1% of businesses generate 80% of AI spending on OpenAI and Anthropic. Growth in that outlay has all but halted for two months, leaving the AI boom dependent on a handful of clients.

In September, per-employee outlays among that top 1% came to $9,568 — 11.7% higher than the prior month yet 3.1% under the July peak. Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian sees falling prices for top models as the main cause of the slowdown.

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The card company monitors the way American businesses pay for AI. It warns, though, that the top 1% estimate is highly variable, since only a very small number of firms fall into that group.

Economist Brad DeLong points out that Ramp's client base is tilted toward technology companies and that free tools are absent from its data.

The volume of tokens — the units used to bill AI models — kept climbing. Spending on those tokens, according to Ramp, rose only slightly in August and September.

Kate Rooney of CNBC has noted that about 80% of those biggest spenders are backed by venture capital.

Pressure from interest rates or a closed window for initial public offerings (IPOs), Rooney argued, would reduce venture funding. From there, the fallout could move through model developers to cloud operators and on to chip producers.

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Asset manager Apollo has likewise warned that the AI spending surge has stalled.

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, meanwhile, has issued a warning about a chip glut. He told Bloomberg that an oversupply of graphics processing units (GPUs) could drive chip prices lower.

On the other side, demand has not vanished. Still, paid AI adoption stood at 55.9% of Ramp businesses in September, according to Kharazian. For the bull case to hold, Rooney said, uptake must broaden to grocers and consumer companies.

Goldman Sachs estimates that AI capital spending accounts for about half of S&P 500 earnings growth. It has pointed clients who are cautious on AI toward defensive stock picks in health care and consumer staples.

Concentration is visible in the index as well. The Kobeissi Letter reported that the 15 largest stocks hold a record 46.7% share of the S&P 500. At the dot-com peak in 2000, the comparable reading was 27.2%.