How much does it cost to train a frontier AI model?

How to get close to this number

Multiply hardware by time. Training a frontier model occupies tens of thousands of specialised processors for weeks to months, and renting that capacity costs a few dollars per chip-hour. Chips times hours times rate gives a figure in the tens to hundreds of millions.

The growth rate in the explanation is what matters more than the level: roughly doubling every year. A cost that doubles annually rises by a factor of a thousand in a decade, which means a capability available to a few dozen organisations today was available to thousands a few years ago and will be available to a handful soon.

That is the structural consequence worth naming: the number of organisations able to do this keeps shrinking. When the cost of participating in a field grows exponentially, the field consolidates regardless of anyone's intent — and the compute figure is the mechanism behind every argument about who controls this technology.