Web3 Devs Sound Alarm: AI Costs Are Spiraling Out of Control
Building the decentralized future just got pricier—and artificial intelligence is the culprit.
### The AI Toll on Web3 Innovation
Startups leveraging AI for smart contracts, NFT generation, or DeFi protocols now face compute costs that make Ethereum gas fees look like pocket change. Open-source projects are getting priced out entirely.
### When 'Disruption' Meets Reality
VCs keep preaching AI-blockchain synergy, but the infrastructure bills tell a different story. One anonymous developer reported burning through $40K/month just for basic image-generation APIs—roughly 20% of their seed funding.
### The Institutional Endgame
Meanwhile, Wall Street's AI plays keep raking in profits. Funny how the 'democratization of tech' always seems to stop where the hedge funds' private server farms begin.
The AI industry is splitting on geopolitical lines
The report shows that AI chip production has fractured into three main blocs, each increasingly independent from the others. One is the U.S.-aligned bloc, dominated by Malaysia and Thailand, which enjoys privileged access to the U.S. market.
On the other hand, China is scaling up its own production of AI chips with Huawei’s Ascend 910C and the CloudMatrix cluster. Meanwhile, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and India are building their own bloc.
