Big tech quietly dials back heavy AI tool use

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Nvidia teams now spend more on compute than full time salaries while Uber burns entire yearly budget in four months…

Executives hype endless efficiency gains and stay quiet on the real cost overruns…

Factcheck:

Yes, recent reports (Axios, Fortune, April-May 2026) confirm this for specific AI use cases. Nvidia’s VP of applied deep learning said AI compute costs for his team now far exceed employee salaries. Uber’s CTO blew its full 2026 AI budget in 4 months on tools like coding agents. Microsoft scaled back some internal AI licenses for cost reasons.

It’s not a broad “AI pullback”—overall industry spending on AI infra keeps rising—but current token/compute costs are making some tools pricier than humans right now. Long-term economics may shift with efficiency gains.

Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing

A top Uber exec said AI is not giving the company bang for its buck.

In a Rapid Response interview released on Saturday, Uber’s operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company.

He said that Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral after telling The Information in an April interview that Uber had already blown through its Claude Code budget for 2026.

The comment led to what he described as a “head-exploding moment,” sparking discussions about AI token consumption within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.