At some major tech companies, the cost of AI compute now exceeds employee salary costs—Nvidia's VP of deep learning told Axios that for his team, compute costs are far beyond employee costs. Uber's CTO already burned through his entire 2026 AI budget just on token costs from coding tools. An MIT study found that in only 23% of computer vision tasks examined was AI cheaper than hiring a human; in 77%, the implementation, maintenance, and hardware costs exceeded human wages. Companies are also forced to hire skilled workers to review AI outputs for factual errors, often ending up with both expensive software and human quality control staff.