Capital & Compute

Choose the system behind the story.

Move beyond the news cycle. Enter through costs, agents, models, hardware, infrastructure or markets, and follow the evidence all the way down.

Six ways into the economics of AI.

Every article has one clear home and can surface in related worlds when the systems overlap.

  1. AI costs

    0195 articles

    Token prices are the sticker. Context windows, retries, cache misses, subscription floors and the work an agent abandons halfway decide the bill. A model that looks half the price per million tokens routinely costs more per finished task, and the gap only appears once the same job is priced end to end across providers.

    Start withWhy Is My AI API Bill So High? 8 Causes and Fixes
    Latest signalMuse Spark 1.2 Pricing: What a Task Really Costs
  2. Coding agents

    0258 articles

    The model matters. The harness around it usually matters more: how an agent reads a repository, what it retries, how much context it wastes, and where the loop stops. Two teams running the same model see cost and success rates diverge by multiples once the scaffolding and workflow differ.

    Start withThe 2026 AI Coding Agent Landscape: Leaders, Costs, Harness
    Latest signalMuse Spark 1.2 Pricing: What a Task Really Costs
  3. Models & benchmarks

    0367 articles

    Leaderboards compress messy reality into a single number, then labs quote whichever number flatters the release. Suites saturate, contamination inflates scores, and the same model under different scaffolding can move ten points. What matters is which benchmarks still separate frontier models, and what each one refuses to measure.

    Start withBest Open-Weight AI Models in 2026
    Latest signalMuse Spark 1.2 Pricing: What a Task Really Costs
  4. Local AI & hardware

    0424 articles

    Memory capacity sets what a machine can load, bandwidth sets how fast it answers, and utilization decides whether owning hardware beats renting it. With DRAM in a shortage cycle the arithmetic keeps moving: a build that paid for itself last quarter may not this one, and the break-even turns on how many hours the box actually runs.

    Start withWhy Local LLMs Got Good in 2026: Capability & Cost
    Latest signalMac mini M6 vs Mac Studio M5 for Local LLMs
  5. Compute infrastructure

    0516 articles

    Behind every model sits a physical stack measured in gigawatts, substations, GPUs and construction schedules, and a financial one measured in debt, leases and depreciation assumptions. Capacity announced today energizes years out, so the distance between what is promised and what is running is where the interesting numbers live.

    Start withWhat Is an AI Data Center? Cost, Power, and Scale
    Latest signalOpenAI Jalapeño vs Nvidia: What the Benchmarks Mean
  6. AI markets

    0636 articles

    Adoption, productivity, publishing and national strategy show where AI creates value and where it only moves it from one balance sheet to another. Measured gains rarely match the claims, search referral traffic is repricing entire publishing models, and countries subsidize compute for reasons that are strategic before they are economic.

    Start withThe AI Productivity Paradox: A Central Bank Measured It
    Latest signalChatGPT Business Premium Seats: $100 List, $120 Floor

Fresh from the field.

133 published analyses