Corporate AI Spending Could Surpass Engineer Salaries by 2029

As companies adopt generative AI, software development costs are shifting away from engineer salaries and traditional software licenses toward token-based model computation. Analyst Tomasz Tunguz said AI computing could become a long-term, structural corporate expense as agentic workflows repeatedly perform reasoning, call tools and process large volumes of data.

Tunguz estimates that by 2029, the amount companies spend on AI tokens for each engineer could exceed that engineer’s salary. At Anthropic, for example, computing expenses are already 2.3 times salary costs. The analysis did not disclose actual amounts, but suggests that model-computation costs could move from tooling budgets into the core cost of labor.