Compute Costs More Than Talent In AI

For leading AI companies, the biggest expense is not talent. It is compute. This chart from Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo, uses Epoch AI data to compare spending at Anthropic, Minimax, and Z.ai across R&D compute, inference compute, and staff plus other costs. In every case, compute accounts for the majority of total spending, underscoring how capital-intensive it has become to build and serve frontier A...