The $100B AI inference market is fragmenting into specialized workload types, just as databases evolved from one category into dozens. Here's the map.
The new sales motion asks three questions : software budget, labor budget, & what ratio you want in three years.
GPU spot market data from Ornn shows B200 rental prices spiking from $2.31 to $4.95 per hour since early March. The spread over H200 has doubled & the timing aligns with frontier model releases.
Anthropic is executing Google's classic playbook : commoditize the complements to protect the castle. In 2026, that means destroying the revenue potential of SaaS categories to ensure the only line item is inference.
Omni raises $90M at $1.5B to power intelligence about the business, not just dashboards.
xAI has the compute & the talent, but not the distribution. Cursor has the distribution & a coding model, but not the GPUs. Their partnership is a $10b bet that vertical integration wins in AI's most important market.
Smarter models used to be less expensive because they were more efficient. A new tokenizer changes the math.
Theory Ventures invests in Artemis's $70M Series A to build the AI-native detection engine for the next era of security operations.
GPU rental prices surged 48% in 60 days. The AI compute shortage will force startups to compete not on speed of iteration, but on access to infrastructure.
No one enters a sales conversation without first asking an AI. Lena Waters on what this means for your go-to-market.
