Barclays estimates AI model companies spend $35–$40 per $100 of revenue on inference across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

A Barclays research report estimated that AI model companies direct approximately $35–$40 of every $100 of revenue to inference-compute costs paid to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The calculation concerns paid inference rather than model-training expenditure.

Barclays estimated that the cloud providers receive approximately $10–$20 of operating profit from that spending. The report associated this with cloud-provider operating margins of 35%–45%.

The report also said adjusted gross margins for AI laboratories’ paid-inference businesses had risen from low-double-digit levels in 2025 to 50%–65% or higher in 2026. It estimated a year-over-year improvement of 30–50 percentage points.

Barclays analysts said actual margins could be higher than the report’s estimates. They also expected margins to decline gradually as competition among frontier models intensified and compute supply expanded; both the cost and margin figures remain analyst estimates rather than company-reported segment results.