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The cost of doing business today may be higher than ever, even if it involves fewer humans.
While some major U.S. companies are starting to see the vast costs of their robotic colleagues as prices soar for AI-driven operations, companies are still pushing employees to use more and more AI.
According to executives at computing companies, the cost of AI has now exceeded the typical employee salary totals.
The mantra is that even more AI usage needs to happen.
"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees," Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at chip maker Nvidia, said in early May.
The cost of AI computing, especially when it comes to coding, has come as a surprise to some companies once they start integrating it into their teams and spreading access to their engineers.
Most of the major corporations have been using Anthropic's Claude, which is seemingly cheap when it comes to image generation, but dollar signs pile up when generating documents or computer code.
As Forbes reported, Uber ran through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. Chief technology officer at the company, Praveen Neppalli Naga, even admitted to spending $1,200 by using AI for a personal demo, with the company's engineer cost ranging from upwards of $250 per month in usage, all the way up to $2,000 per month.
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Huiying Ore/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Between December and March, Uber achieved a 95% usage rate among its engineers to implement AI tools and use Claude for coding.
Over at Microsoft, thousands of its developers were invited to use Claude for coding, but so were project managers, designers, and other employees.
The Verge reported that after starting in just December, the usage has become so popular that the company is making a switch and adopting Microsoft's own Copilot model into its workflow.
The mantra shared by all of these companies is that even more AI usage needs to happen. Amazon, Uber, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta are pushing employees to keep spending tokens.
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Idrees MOHAMMED/AFP/Getty Images
Uber ranked its engineers on internal leaderboards based on Claude code usage. A Meta employee reportedly made a leaderboard titled "Claudenomics" to track which workers were using Claude the most.
Fortune reported that Amazon is pushing employees to "tokenmaxx" and use as many tokens as possible.
As icing on the cake, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he believes eventually every employee at his company will work alongside 100 AI agents.
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