The AI Compute Crunch Is Here (and It's Affecting the Entire Economy)

AI compute is no longer VC-subsidized and the downstream costs are spilling into the real economy — gadget prices, consumer electricity rates, labor-market tightness around datacenter build-out. Lead with the subsidy crossover: the era of cheap inference is ending, and every AI-dependent product now has to price in GPU scarcity. The reader — a developer who has been using these APIs as a free lunch — should see why 'cheap AI forever' was always a VC balance-sheet decision, not a physics fact.