AI Revenue Breakdown: Infra, Models, and Hardware

View profile for Akash Bhatia

Senior Partner and Global Tech Sector Leader at BCG

Good summary of where the money is currently flowing in AI (mostly infra & models) and the separation that's occurring between the infra and SaaS players. From UBS ("Latest Customer AI Adoption Checks", 24 Aug 2025). AI Applications: Estimated ≈ $9B revenue, with ≈ $3B from Microsoft Copilot products, < $1B from Salesforce/ServiceNow/Adobe, ≈ $2B from AI startups (Cursor, Midjourney, Perplexity, Glean, Harvey), and ≈ $3B from custom-built AI (Palantir, Accenture, etc.). Note: inflated as some revenues flow to model providers. Model Providers: Roughly ≈ $22B revenue, led by OpenAI (≈ $12B), Anthropic (≈ $4B), xAI (≈ $1B), Cohere/Mistral (≈ $0.5B), and Google/Meta (≈ $4–5B combined). Cloud Infrastructure: Around ≈ $32B revenue, driven by Microsoft Azure AI (≈ $18.6B), GPU-centric providers (CoreWeave, Lambda, ≈ $6B), plus Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud (“several billion”). GPUs/Hardware: Dominated by Nvidia’s data center revenues (≈ $156B run-rate), with broader AI-related hardware pushing the total above $200B.

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Anshu Sharma

Co-founder & CEO Skyflow - the data privacy vault for securing the modern AI data stack.

1mo

So.. "Infra, data, and security" are a good category. One should go build at the intersection of all 3.

Bask Iyer

CEO, BaskMind.com, Snr. Advisor/ Board member at BCG, Zoom, Automation Anywhere, Cohesity, Iron Mountain, and tech startups. Former C level at Honeywell, Dell, VMware, Juniper Networks,etc.

1mo

I think “real” businesses will have to start seeing real productivity gains. Not just a promise. Plus some concerns on trust and liability as well. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/baskiyer_the-agentic-ai-trust-crisis-why-were-stuck-activity-7367390771831808001-NB2x

Karl Keirstead

Software Equity Research at UBS

1mo

Thanks for flagging to your network Akash

Also part of the problem of the current AI hype… SaaS is much closer to the “business”, whereas infra is much more of a commodity. If you add “data center builders” I would expect an even bigger jump over SaaS!

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