The Headroom Argument: Why AI Efficiency Means More Compute, Not Less
Updated AI models arrive almost daily, alongside new architectures and efficiency techniques. The instinctive reading is that this is good news for the AI budget, and that the capex commitments hyperscalers are making will turn out to be over-sized for a market becoming dramatically more efficient. That reading is the wrong way around. This article examines why architectural efficiency releases demand rather than reducing it, what every prior era of computing tells us about where the inference market is heading, and how Boards should read efficiency news to fund the right opportunity rather than the wrong budget.
