Top US Companies Spend $7,500 per Employee Monthly on AI, Below Software Engineer Salaries

en.Wedoany.com Reported - A senior executive at Nvidia recently stated that companies' computing costs have surpassed employee salary expenses. Earlier, the CEO of startup Mercor also claimed that the token fees paid by the company for internal agents have exceeded total employee compensation. These remarks have sparked discussions on whether AI investment has truly overtaken labor costs.

According to the latest research data from the Ramp AI Index, which measures AI adoption rates among US companies, this is not the case. The top 1% of companies (referred to by Ramp as "AI addicts") spend $7,500 per employee per month. This expenditure is lower than the average monthly salary of a software engineer, which is approximately $16,000. The top 10% of companies spend about $611 per employee per month, while the median company spends only about $11.38, equivalent to the price of an enterprise-tier seat license.

Although overall AI spending remains lower than labor costs, it is still growing in companies with higher AI usage. Among "AI addict" companies, AI spending per employee increased by 14.1% last month. Whether this trend can be sustained remains unclear. The top 1% of companies tend to mix and match multiple frontier models and switch between platforms offering cheaper open-source models.

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