Private Flight or Cell Phones? The Unit Economics of AI
Trevor Noren (Sage Road Research) and Apollo ask the demand-side question: the marginal cost of compute exceeds its marginal benefit, corporate token spending is slowing, and hyperscaler ROIC has halved from ~38% to ~20%. We cover the prisoner's dilemma of the buildout, the private-flight-vs-cell-phones analogy for agentic AI, the fiber-optic precedent — and why it all still points to owning the tollbooth.
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