Enterprise AI costs hit 2026 low driven by price wars, Chinese open-source models: research

The cost for businesses to run AI models has fallen to a yearly low, according to research by investment bank Jefferies, driven by a heated global price war and a surge in adoption of low-cost Chinese open-source tools, such as those from DeepSeek.Average inference prices – measured per million tokens, or chunks of data handled by a model – ranged between US$1.16 and US$1.18 from August 6 to 8. That marked the lowest level recorded this year, Jefferies said on Monday, citing data from US research firm Silicon Data. Average unit costs have plummeted from US$2.04 on May 31 and US$1.45 in late July.Silicon Data’s index tracks pricing across business application programming interface (API) providers and open-weight inference platforms used by software developers.