Who Captures the Most Margin in AI?

Tomasz Tunguz maps the AI value chain across five layers—power plant, data center operator, neocloud, inference vendor and AI application—and normalizes each to dollars per watt per year to compare gross profit pools, which at a 40% application gross margin split as power 3%, data center 5%, neocloud 28% before GPU depreciation, inference 24% and application 40%. He argues rising compute prices will test who holds pricing power, that applications will command varying pricing power based on ROI, and that vertical integration is already consolidating margin, citing CoreWeave's acquisitions of Weights & Biases, OpenPipe, Marimo and Monolith AI and Nebius spending more than $1b in 2026 on four companies.