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September 24, 2026
Partner, Chief Economist
Roughly 10% of software-spending businesses on Ramp now pay a GPU vendor, up from under 4% two years ago, see chart below. Nearly all of that came from model serving and inference, which went from 2.4% to 8.7% of firms, while neoclouds crept from 2.0% to 3.3%, and wholesale GPU capacity never left the floor at 0.1%.
That gap describes what most companies are actually doing with AI. Businesses are adding a model to an existing product or workflow, paying per call, and treating it as another software subscription they can cancel next month. Very few are building anything that requires owning or reserving the hardware underneath.
The table below shows how unevenly the dollars land. The top 10% of customers account for 99.5% of model-serving spend and 99% of neocloud spend, leaving the bottom 90% of firms with 0.5% and 1%.
For comparison, non-AI SaaS is at 91.8% and CRM at 84.2%, where the long tail still contributes a real 15.8%, because a small company buying a CRM buys something close to what a large one buys. AI spending tracks how much you run, not how many people you have, which is why a small number of firms in production dwarf everyone else.
The bottom line is that adoption is broadening while the spending base is not, and AI infrastructure will keep depending on a small set of heavy spenders until the tail scales up.
Sources: Ramp Chief Economist Ara Kharazian, Apollo Chief Economist
Sources: Ramp Chief Economist Ara Kharazian, Apollo Chief Economist
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