Same AI performance now costs half as much each quarter; data-center revenue assumptions need a rethink
Epoch AI estimates inference cost at equal performance falls 13x a year; the pace of price deflation on the revenue side of compute is worth tracking.
Original event 2026-09-22
Epoch AI estimates that over the past three years, the cost of reaching a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter on average — roughly 13-fold a year.
The report's example: in January 2025, o3 needed about $0.30 per question to score 75% on GPQA Diamond; in mid-2026, GPT-5.6 Luna hit the same score for $0.0004 — a roughly 725-fold drop in under 18 months. Math benchmarks fell fastest (50–52% per quarter), game-based puzzles slower (39–43%).
This is the authors' own analysis, and the report names its limits: benchmarks may be gamed, and it assumes users always pick the cheapest capable model, so the numbers should not be read as exact. Even at these prices, the report notes total spending could stay high as usage expands.