Barclays, in its August 28 research report on AI industry unit economics, noted that AI labs' paid inference profit margins have surged from low double-digits in 2025 to over 50%-65% in 2026, with adjusted gross margins improving by 30-50 percentage points year-over-year, primarily driven by enterprise clients and agentic workflows. Analyst Ross Sandler believes actual profit margins could be higher but expects them to gradually decline in the future. Barclays estimates that the total revenue for AI labs will grow from $7 billion in 2024 to $137 billion in 2026, reaching $690 billion by 2028. Concurrently, the proportion of cloud vendors' AI revenue to AI labs' revenue is projected to decrease from 153% in 2024 to 73% in 2028, with the three major cloud vendors potentially starting to lose market share in training and inference from 2028 onwards.