The marginal cost of nuclear energy is 14-20% of the total cost according to pages 39,40 of [1].

The point I'm making is that claiming that AI labs would be profitable if only they could stop spending money on the only thing that makes them valuable is absurd. Frontier models are like a nuclear power plant that needs to be rebuilt from scratch every 24 months.

Let's say that they paused R&D a year ago. It's June 2026, OpenAI's latest offering is GPT 4.1, Codex is still just a private beta that hasn't been updated in months. How much revenue do you think they would be making right now? My guess is approximately zero.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

The labs don’t have to stop r and d to become profitable. They just need more customers. This strategy doesn’t work in nuclear. Building a nuclear plant doesn’t mean you can scale it up to serve the whole world. Building an ai model does.