Can AI answer the $3 trillion question?

Someone minding that gap is Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, the giant asset manager. In a recent note, he points out that the hyperscalers — Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — are all predicting massive accelerations in their free-cash flow in 2028. That is, they expect to see the pay-back from all those chips they bought.

What if they don’t? Slok notes a risk we’re currently seeing across AI usage: More organizations turning to cheaper open weight models, often Chinese, not those built by the frontier labs, and overall token prices falling. OpenAI’s latest model, per CEO Sam Altman, is 54% more token efficient on coding tasks. That’s good for users fretting about the cost of their AI agents, but it may be bad for companies building token factories should users not wildly increase their overall token usage with them.

Slok worries that if hyperscalers don’t meet their cash flow goals, the market reaction could be severe—
“with so much riding on so few names,” he writes, “a slower payoff wouldn’t just be a sector problem, it would risk tipping the economy into recession and the S&P 500 into a correction.”

Just something to keep in mind keep in mind as you’re herding your AI agents toward cheaper tokens.