By Charles Hugh Smith
OfTwoMinds.com
July 10, 2026
Let's pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users' costs.
What's already abundantly clear but verboten to say as it would pop the bubble of AI valuations and triumphalism is that AI is unaffordable once the direct and indirect subsidies are withdrawn. Nothing that consumes this much electricity and requires such an immense scale of costly processing and memory capacity can be low-cost, never mind free.