AI Token Prices “Fell Almost 15%” Last Month. That’s Good News for Amazon Aditya Raghunath Fri, November 13, 2026 at 6:58 AM EST 5 min read AMZN +1.18% ANTH.PVT RAMP.PVT OPAI.PVT Trade AMZN on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Ramp's data shows businesses used 30% more AI tokens in October but spent only about 10% more, as OpenAI's and Anthropic's token prices fell almost 15%.
A price war between the AI labs helps the clouds that sell the computing power, and Amazon is one of the biggest.
AWS grew 39% in Q3 at a 38.7% operating margin, and Amazon (AMZN:NASDAQ) still plans about $220 billion of cash capex in 2026.
If the labs' revenue keeps falling behind their usage, they could cut back the compute deals that fill AWS's data centers, so Anthropic's IPO is the next thing to watch.
Anthropic's IPO is days away, and new spending data shows the AI labs are in a price war.
Ramp's AI Index draws on transaction data from more than 85,000 American businesses.
As Prof G Markets' Ed Elson summed it up on this week's episode, "for OpenAI and Anthropic, token prices fell almost 15% last month."
That's bad news for the labs as Anthropic heads into its debut. It's good news for Amazon, which sells the computing power that all those cheaper tokens run on.
Elson noted that they used about 30% more tokens in October than the month before, but "they spent only about 10% more to purchase those tokens."
Divide 10% more spending by 30% more tokens, and each token cost about 15% less.
Ara Kharazian, Ramp's lead economist, doesn't blame cheap Chinese models, which he said make up less than 5% of business AI spending in Ramp's data.
He said that "if you were to ban all the Chinese models tomorrow, you would still see this kind of price competition from OpenAI and Anthropic just on their own." So I wouldn't count on prices bottoming out any time soon.
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Much of the labs' computing runs on rented capacity, and both labs rent a lot of it from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon's quarterly report says OpenAI added $100 billion over eight years to its AWS commitment in Q1 2026, and Anthropic added more than $100 billion over ten years in the second.
AWS CEO Matt Garman expects falling prices to bring in far more of that business. As he told Alex Heath on Sources, "every time we see inference get, you know, 50% cheaper, we see an order of magnitude more usage."
At half the price and 10 times the usage, customers end up spending five times as much. Garman also expects AWS to be short of capacity for the next couple of years, even though it's landing a GPU every 14 seconds.
Analysts expect Amazon's revenue to grow from $717 billion in 2025 to $1.12 trillion in 2028:
Nothing in Ramp's numbers makes me expect those estimates to come down. Cheaper tokens mean more usage, and AWS gets paid for the computing power behind it.
Amazon's capital spending rose from $52.7 billion in 2023 to $132 billion in 2025 as it built data centers to meet that demand:
It isn't slowing down, either. When it reported Q3 results, Amazon stuck with its plan for about $220 billion of cash capex in 2026.
So far, AWS is filling that capacity at strong margins. Its revenue grew 39% to $46.0 billion in Q3, and its operating margin was 38.7%, up from 34.6% a year earlier.
Its backlog of contracted revenue reached $578 billion at Sept. 30, up from $496 billion three months earlier.
AWS now earns most of Amazon's profit, which has helped lift the company's overall operating margin from 2.6% in 2022 to 11.2% in 2025:
If the labs' revenue keeps falling behind their usage, they could scale back the compute deals that fill AWS's data centers.
Amazon is also an owner: it valued its Anthropic stake at $190.4 billion on June 30, so a weak IPO price could mean a loss on it.
And Ramp's index covers only businesses that use Ramp, so one month of its data doesn't describe the whole market.
The way I see it, the labs' price war is good news for Amazon. The labs are fighting over who can sell the cheapest token, while AWS gets paid for the computing power either way and sees more usage each time prices fall.
Of course, Anthropic's IPO will show what investors think the labs' business is worth.
Amazon's 2027 capex outlook, due with its Q4 results in early February, will show how much more capacity it thinks all that usage needs.
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