AI inference revenue is on a trajectory toward $300-400 billion by 2028 and potentially trillions of dollars by 2030, which justifies the industry's massive CapEx spending.
Brad Gerstner points to Dario Amodei's and Jensen Huang's revenue forecasts to argue that inference revenue is scaling fast enough to justify the roughly $1.5 trillion in projected annual AI CapEx by 2027. ✦ AI generated
Brad Gerstner · BG2 Pod · 2026-06-11 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 65:51
“So, we're spending 1.5 trillion of CapEx on 300 billion of inference revenue. Does that math math for you?”
Dario did the podcast with Dwarkesh when he was talking about country geniuses in the data center. He said that will be here by 2028. He said revenues will go into the low hundreds of billions by 2028. So, let's call that, you know, 3 400 billion of revenue by 2028.
verbatim transcript · starts at 65:51
65:51>> And so, like, let's give the guy some credit and think about what he is saying right now. >> For sure, for sure. And and listen, I would say consistently, Elon's been taking the over. Sundar's been taking the over. Sam, Dario, you know, Dario did the podcast with Dwarkesh when he was talking about country geniuses in the data center. He said that will be here by 2028. He said revenues will go into
66:16the low hundreds of billions by 2028. So, let's call that, you know, 3 400 billion of revenue by 2028. And he said that a while ago now, so he may even be revising up his number. And he said it's hard for me to see that there won't be trillions of dollars in revenue before 2030. And if you're on that revenue trajectory, if we're on a trajectory to
66:36200 by the end of this year, let's call it 4 or 500 by next year, and a path to trillion plus by 2029, then the math maths. >> And we got to keep in mind that half of the spending is there to you know, for training, maybe a little less than half. What is it, Foxy? >> It's probably that depends on the lab, but it's I would say it's increasingly
66:56less than half. >> Yes. >> Okay. So, we'll call it 35% is spending that's not revenue generating, but it's going to kind of make the next model. So, I think the math maths. >> Right. >> And there's still this prisoner's dilemma where if you opted out, that may be an existential decision. >> And I think like coming into this year, going back to this kind of what
67:12narratives were violated, you know, I think into this year everyone expected token pricing, uh the price of compute, it's all deflationary. And it will be kind of a smooth line deflationary over time. But, I think this year what we've seen is the opposite. And you know, it's all comes back to supply-demand. The demand side of the equation seems to be far outstripping the supply. Right? And I think
67:36you look at the deals signed by SpaceX and others, the monetization rates per watt are increasing. Um and look, that is on a a pretty nascent small base of users, right? Like Alex at Well Rock, he has this great um way to frame it. Less than 0.2% of people on Earth are actually using AI in an agentic way. >> Right. >> Right? Like I'm not a technical person,