AI's First Revenue Census Puts Generative-AI Sales at $110 Billion, Above Infrastructure Depreciation

The generative artificial intelligence (AI) sector booked more than 110 billion US dollars in real end-customer revenue over the trailing twelve months, according to the first State of the AI Economy report from Azeem Azhar's Exponential View. The figure deliberately removes supply-chain double counting, so it reflects what end customers actually paid rather than the marked-up total of every reseller and cloud fee in between.

The comparison that matters most to anyone modeling the buildout is revenue against depreciation. The report finds that first-quarter 2026 AI sales outside China reached roughly 25 billion dollars, ahead of the estimated 21 billion in quarterly depreciation on data-center and chip infrastructure, as summarized in early coverage. The annualized run rate now exceeds 175 billion dollars, and the report puts revenue growth at roughly three times the pace of the early mobile and internet eras, drawn from spending data across more than 1,000 companies.

The framing deserves skepticism. Revenue exceeding depreciation in a single non-China quarter is not the same as the industry covering its full cost of capital, which includes the financing and energy that do not appear in a depreciation line, and the comparison excludes China's own large and partly state-funded spending. The author benefits from an optimistic reading, and the figure is a vendor-adjacent estimate rather than audited accounts. What is verifiable is that the methodology measures realized cash, not a projection of total addressable market, which makes it a more reliable baseline than most figures now circulating.