Palihapitiya: AI token spend will hit company earnings
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- Chamath Palihapitiya told CNBC that AI token spending could negatively impact some companies' earnings, arguing CEOs and CFOs "probably have no idea how much tokenmaxxing is going on inside of their organizations"
- Palihapitiya predicted a future earnings miss where EPS comes in "off by a few pennies" and the CEO asks the CFO "What happened?"
- 8090, the AI startup Palihapitiya founded in 2024, raised $135 million in a round led by Salesforce in June and is building a platform for collaborating with AI agents on enterprise software
- Palihapitiya said in March his own company's AI spending is trending toward more than $10 million a year, calling it "very scary" and suspecting other companies are seeing similar revenue ramps without meaningful ROI
- Palantir CEO Alex Karp earlier this month sharply criticized OpenAI and Anthropic for their token-based pricing models, saying "something has gone completely wrong" and enterprises will "chillax and waste my time with tokens"
Why it matters: For enterprise CFOs, the risk is an AI line item that grew outside procurement's visibility and shows up as a quarterly miss. Both Palihapitiya and Palantir's Alex Karp flagged this as a real concern—Palihapitiya disclosed his own startup's AI spend is trending toward $10M+ a year—signaling token-based pricing is drawing scrutiny from customers who can't yet justify the ROI.
