AI costs

Canva

2026-08-13 02:23:18

Canva Cuts Annual Growth Outlook by a Third to 20% as AI Delivery Costs Bite

Canva has cut its annual revenue growth target by a third to 20%, blaming AI feature delivery costs that ran far above expectations. CEO Melanie Perkins said user demand for the AI features was "significantly beyond expectations," but the company plans to hold off on large-scale rollout until it can optimize its architecture, lower unit costs and refine its business model. Since launching Canva AI 2.0 in April, per-task costs have fallen nearly 90%, yet AI users now generate three times as many designs as with the earlier version, keeping profitability under pressure. The situation points to a broader software industry problem: AI inference costs are breaking the traditional zero-marginal-cost economics of software. PitchBook analysts call Canva and Figma the most obvious signals. Figma's free cash flow margin slid from 27% in the first quarter to 14% in the second, with third-quarter revenue growth expected to slow from 48% to 36%. Canva, which conducted an employee share sale at a $42 billion valuation, was once expected to go public in 2026; analysts now believe the IPO may be pushed to next year.

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ARK Invest

2026-08-11 10:02:54

ARK Invest says a Tesla-SpaceX merger could be announced by year-end, with China seen as a manageable issue

ARK Invest used the latest episode of its podcast The Brainstorm to argue that China is unlikely to be the decisive obstacle to a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, while also laying out an aggressive view on how quickly AI costs are collapsing. In the Aug. 7 episode, Brett Winton said Tesla’s Shanghai factory is no longer the core driver of the company’s future value because Robotaxi, not China manufacturing, sits at the center of Tesla’s next phase. He said Chinese assets could likely be ring-fenced to address national security concerns tied to SpaceX and added that a formal merger announcement could come before the end of 2026. The discussion also focused on AI economics. Winton said ARK’s data shows annualized cost declines of 99.99% on a harder agentic benchmark between February and July 31, up from a 99% annual drop cited in the firm’s Big Ideas report. He argued that the shift is not only about lower cost at a fixed level of performance, but also about higher performance ceilings, pointing to tasks that were unattainable earlier this year but can now be completed for 15 cents each. Nick Grous took a more cautious stance on who ultimately wins the market, citing examples such as Spotify, Robinhood, Block and Palantir to argue that model routing, open-source tools and application-layer strategies could still leave room for many players.

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GitHub

2026-07-23 13:50:16

GitHub Copilot Halts Self-Service Subscriptions as Agentic AI Costs Blow Up Pricing Model

GitHub abruptly stops new self-service sign-ups for Copilot Business and personal plans, citing agentic AI workflows that burn through tokens faster than subscription fees cover. Free tier remains open.

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OpenRouter

2026-07-14 07:02:55

OpenRouter data shows nearly half of U.S. AI usage has shifted to Chinese models

U.S. companies are sending a much larger share of their AI traffic to Chinese models than they were 18 months ago, according to data cited by CNBC from routing platform OpenRouter. The share of tokens used by U.S. firms through Chinese AI models rose from an average of 4.5% in the first half of 2025 to a peak of 46% in April 2026, and stayed above 30% every week starting Feb. 8. Over the same period, the combined share of U.S. models dropped sharply on the platform. Price is the clearest driver in the shift. OpenRouter analyst Justin Summerville told CNBC that leading Chinese open-source models are 60% to 90% cheaper than top offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. DeepSeek V4 Flash was priced at $0.14 per million input tokens versus $5 for GPT-5.5, while output pricing showed an even wider gap. The change is also showing up in enterprise spending. Ramp’s June data put DeepSeek at the top of its trending software vendors list, while AI startup Lindy said it moved 100% of its traffic from Claude to DeepSeek v4 and cut inference costs by about 90%.

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AI costs

2026-07-10 18:13:13

AI Inference Costs Erase Layoff Savings at Shopify, Roblox, and Spotify

Shopify, Roblox, and Spotify report that rising AI inference costs are wiping out savings from recent workforce reductions. Roblox has cut its full-year profit forecast, while Pinterest warns AI chip investments will pressure margins throughout the year.

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