The Great AI Pricing Reset Is Coming. Are You Ready?
CIO, Monday, October 12th, 2026
Vendors' AI subsidies are ending, and as context memory moves to flash, token costs inherit volatile NAND pricing.
This opinion piece cites Harvard Business Review's warning of an AI 'cost shock' as vendors stop absorbing GPU, inference and token costs.
Token volumes are exploding, with Google citing 3.2 quadrillion a month, and agentic workflows push input tokens to the top of the cost stack.
NVIDIA's CMX platform offloads the KV cache to NVMe SSDs, so inference costs now depend on flash prices, which by one index rose 472% for 30TB TLC drives in a year.
The author advises reserving flash for hot context data and placing checkpoints and other retained data on cheaper tiers.